Hardwood Stump Grinding in Nashville, Tennessee

The Hardwood Stumps Nashville Is Actually Grinding

Metro Urban Forestry publishes a prohibited tree list, and read the right way it is a forecast of residential removal work. Silver maple is on it. So is Callery pear, flagged as invasive and prone to breaking. So is pin oak. So is every species of ash.

Two of those drive most of what we see. Silver maple went into Nashville yards in quantity from the 1940s through the 1960s, all across Woodbine, Charlotte Park, Inglewood and the interwar blocks of Sylvan Park and 12 South, and those trees are now eighty years old and shedding leaders in every ice event. Pin oak went in as a boulevard tree, which is why Magnolia Boulevard and Belmont Boulevard have the character they do and why Belmont-Hillsboro produces pin oak stumps on a regular cycle.

Density separates them. Silver maple is a soft hardwood: the wheel feeds through it quickly and the chips come off long and pale. White oak, shagbark hickory, black walnut and the Osage orange left in old fencerows out past Whites Creek are a different job entirely, and the difference is measured in passes rather than in horsepower.

Why Oak Stump Grinding Runs Slower Than Maple

A dense hardwood does not stop a grinder. It slows the feed and it eats teeth, and both of those are time. On a 40-inch white oak we will change carbide part way through as a matter of routine rather than as a problem, because running dull teeth on dense wood polishes the face instead of cutting it and turns an afternoon into two.

The abrasives here are local. Talbott residuum is clayey soil over limestone, and a root plate that grew in it carries limestone shards worked between the roots. On the Highland Rim ground out at Joelton the soil is deeper but cherty, which is worse for steel than the limestone is. Neither of those is visible from the surface, and neither is the old fence staple in a hedgerow black locust.

Measure the flare, not the cut. Open-grown trees on the larger lots in Inglewood, Bordeaux and Whites Creek spread buttresses that make the tape lie by six or eight inches, and a fluted hackberry or a hollow-hearted water oak reads small from above while the hard outer ring is the whole job.

Ash Stump Removal and the Emerald Ash Borer in Davidson County

The borer arrived in Tennessee in 2010 and turned up in Davidson County four years later. Metro Water's position is blunt: untreated, it takes every ash native to this continent. Metro publishes notice of the ash trees it takes off public ground. Everything on private ground is on the owner's schedule, and most owners are running behind it.

Dead ash is a hazard removal rather than a planned one, and that changes the stump. A crew taking down a brittle standing ash works fast and cuts high or cuts flush with a saw, and the wood they leave has been dead long enough to dry hard and check. Dry ash grinds harder than green ash, and the stump often has bark already sloughed off, so the flare is easier to read but the face is tougher.

If the tree is still standing and still has leaves, get it looked at now rather than in two years. A live ash comes down safely and cheaply. A three-year-dead ash over a garage in Lockeland Springs is a crane conversation before it is ever a stump conversation.

What to Replant Where a Nashville Hardwood Stump Was

This comes up on most hardwood jobs, so here is the useful version. Metro's approved large-canopy column is almost entirely oak, and native oak at that. Shumard and Nuttall for a wet spot. Chinkapin or chestnut oak on a dry limestone shoulder. Swamp white and overcup on bottom ground. Scarlet, southern red, cherrybark, bur, shingle, northern red and plain white oak through the middle. Willow oak is on there too, which is what the streetcar-era crews planted in the first place.

The practical constraint is the hole. If the new tree is going in the same spot, the grindings have to come out and clean soil has to go in, because a root ball set into fresh wood spoil sits in material that will compress and rob nitrogen while it breaks down. Plan for that when you book the grind rather than discovering it with a tree on the driveway.

Out in the planted strip along the street, though, the choice is only partly yours. The ground belongs to Metro, the replacement has to be something the Tree Advisory Committee lists, and it has to arrive single-trunked at two inches of caliper or better and at least six feet of height, with sign-off before planting.

Hardwoods we grind most often around Davidson County

• Silver maple, soft for a hardwood, fast feed, huge flares, and on Metro's prohibited list
• Willow oak and water oak, the streetcar-grid standard, often hollow-hearted at eighty years
• Pin oak from the Belmont and Magnolia Boulevard plantings, also prohibited for replanting
• White oak and chestnut oak off the Bordeaux bluffs and Bellevue slopes, dense and slow
• Shagbark hickory and black walnut, hard on teeth, with walnut spoil you should not mulch with
• Hackberry and sugarberry, fluted trunks that read smaller than they grind
• Ash, dead or dying countywide since 2014, dry and checked by the time it is cut