What Nashville Won't Let You Replant Where the Stump Was

Metro's Prohibited List Explains the Stump You Just Removed

Metro Nashville Urban Forestry publishes a recommended and prohibited tree and shrub list, and the prohibited half reads like an inventory of the stumps we grind. Silver maple is on it. Callery pear and all its cultivars are on it, flagged as invasive and prone to breaking. Pin oak is on it. Every ash is on it. So are tree of heaven, mimosa, princess tree, chinaberry, white poplar, Siberian elm and paper mulberry.

That is not a coincidence and it is not aesthetic preference. Those species are prohibited because of what they do here — split, sucker, invade or die — and two of them drive most of the residential stump volume in this city. The silver maples that went in across Nashville between the forties and the sixties are shedding leaders now. The Callery pears planted through the eighties and nineties come apart in every ice storm. If you are reading this because one of them is now a stump in your yard, the list is telling you why.

Ash, Emerald Ash Borer and the Stumps Still Coming

Ash is on the prohibited list for a different reason. The emerald ash borer has been in Davidson County since 2014 and in Tennessee since 2010, and Metro's position is that it will kill every North American ash unless the tree is treated. Metro publishes notice of its own ash removals, which is a reasonable indication of the scale.

For a homeowner that produces a decision rather than an emergency: treat the tree on an ongoing programme, or plan the removal. What it should not produce is waiting until the tree is dead for three years, because a long-dead ash goes brittle through the trunk and the root collar rots rather than staying sound. That changes the grind — the spoil comes up soft and punky and does not refill the hole the way solid wood does — and it makes the standing tree considerably more dangerous to take down beforehand. The stump is the easy end of that problem.

What Metro Recommends Planting Over a Ground Stump

The recommended large-canopy side of Metro's list leans heavily on native oaks: white, swamp white, scarlet, southern red, cherrybark, overcup, shingle, bur, chinkapin, Nuttall, willow, chestnut, northern red and Shumard. That is a deliberate answer to a city that lost canopy through the 2010s and is trying to get it back — Root Nashville is working toward 500,000 trees planted across Davidson County by 2050, with Madison, North Nashville and South Nashville named as priority areas.

If you are replanting in the right-of-way rather than the yard, the rules tighten. Metro requires approval from both Metro Water Services and NDOT, the tree has to come off the recommended list at a minimum two-inch caliper and six feet tall, single trunk only, and the clearance rules apply — nothing within ten feet of a drain inlet, hydrant, power line, utility box or streetlight, and twenty-five feet back from an intersection.

Preparing a Ground Stump Hole for the Next Tree

A fresh grind hole is not a planting hole, and treating it as one is the most common way a replacement tree fails. What is in there is wood chip and a modest amount of soil, and as that chip breaks down it pulls nitrogen out of the surrounding ground and the whole volume drops as it compacts. A sapling planted into that in the first season ends up sitting low in a sinking pocket with its root flare buried.

The better sequence is to have the grind go deeper than standard where you already know you are replanting, remove most of the chip rather than backfilling with it, and fill with soil. Then give it a season. If you want the tree in sooner, plant it a few feet to one side of where the old trunk stood rather than directly in the hole — the old root system is still down there decomposing either way, and offsetting costs you nothing. Tell us at quote stage if a replant is planned, because it changes how deep we go and what we do with the chips.