Stump Grinding in Bordeaux, Nashville

On a bluff lot the slope sets the stump job, not the stump

Metro's own community plan for this side of the river puts roughly half the Bordeaux and Whites Creek area on terrain of twenty percent slope or steeper, and names the Cumberland River bluffs in the Katie Hill and Fern Avenue area specifically. A twenty percent grade is not a hillside garden. It is ground where a machine has to be positioned deliberately, worked across the fall line rather than up and down it, and where every cubic foot of spoil wants to travel downhill on its own.

That is the real constraint on a Bordeaux job. The oak or hickory on a level lot off Clarksville Pike is a straightforward afternoon. The same tree two streets up on the bluff edge is a different piece of work: a longer setup, mats or anchoring, and a plan for holding the grindings on site rather than letting them wash toward a river buffer that sits immediately downhill.

Grinding storm-broken oak and hickory six years on

The tornado of 3 March 2020 came off Bells Bend and tracked through Bordeaux on its way to Tennessee State University and North Nashville, and the wooded acreage here took it full on. What is left is not a population of clean stumps. It is split trunks cut wherever a saw could reach in the weeks afterwards, root plates partly lifted out of the ground, and trees that stayed standing with the fibre on one side already torn.

A heaved plate is worked differently from a flush cut. The mass is unstable, it is full of soil and rock, and it has to be brought down and cut apart in a controlled order rather than approached from whichever side is convenient. Shagbark hickory and chestnut oak make that harder again - they are the hardest wood on this side of the county and the feed rate drops to a fraction of what a silver maple allows. We price these after seeing them rather than from a photograph of the top.

Keeping grindings out of the river buffer below the bluff

Metro requires disturbed ground to be stabilised within fifteen days, and on a bluff lot the distance between the work and a watercourse is short enough that this stops being paperwork and becomes a practical question. Spoil left loose at the top of a twenty percent grade goes where gravity takes it in the first hard rain.

So the method changes on slopes. The material is contained as it comes off the wheel, and it either goes back into the void compacted in lifts and crowned, or it is loaded up the hill and off the property. We do not build a spoil heap on the downhill side of a bluff-edge stump and call it landscaping. Where the grade is steep enough that carrying material uphill is the only route out, that is on the quote - it is genuine extra work and pretending otherwise would just mean finding a reason to leave it behind.

Winching a stump grinder in from a long gravel drive

Plenty of the wooded acreage here sits at the top or the bottom of a few hundred yards of gravel that climbs, turns and narrows on the way. A trailer cannot always get to the work, so the machine walks the last part under its own power or gets winched down to a position where it can be set safely.

That takes time at both ends and we allow for it rather than discovering it on the day. It also means we would rather do everything on a property in one visit: several stumps, the storm-broken pair down the slope, and the fencerow hackberry all in the same trip. On the flatter side, around Hartman Park and the streets off Clarksville Pike with their nine-thousand-square-foot lots, none of this applies - those are ordinary yard jobs with ordinary access, and they are booked and priced as such.

Two kinds of Bordeaux stump: ranch yard and bluff woods

Two different stumps come out of this neighbourhood. The mid-century brick ranches were landscaped with silver maple and water oak, which are now fifty to seventy years old, shedding limbs, and on Metro's prohibited list in the case of the maple. Those are soft, fast to cut and generous with chip - a straightforward job on a flat lot.

The bluff woods are the opposite: white oak, chestnut oak, southern red oak, shagbark hickory, with tulip poplar and beech in the ravines and eastern red cedar on thin limestone shoulders. The cedar is worth a mention on its own - it is small but the wood is dense and stringy and it sits on a rocky shoulder where the wheel finds stone almost immediately, so a modest-looking cedar stump takes far longer than the diameter suggests. We tell you which of these two jobs you have before quoting, because they are not the same price per inch.