Stump Grinding in Woodbine and Glencliff, Nashville

A stump in the strip sits on the oldest pipe in South Nashville

Woodbine and Glencliff kept something most of this side of town lost: continuous public sidewalk on a 1920s to 1950s grid, with a planting strip between the walk and the kerb. The water oaks and pin oaks set into that strip when the houses went up are seventy to a hundred years old now, and they have lifted the slabs into steps that people trip over on Peachtree, Morton and McCall.

Underneath that same narrow band of grass runs the oldest utility in the neighbourhood. Clay sewer laterals from the original build, cast-iron water, gas, and NES secondary cable all share it, because that strip is where everything was put when there was nowhere else. So the job is never just a stump. It is a stump standing on a hundred-year-old pipe, in ground that belongs to Metro, in front of a slab that is the owner's responsibility to maintain - three different legal objects in about four feet of width.

Locating before a stump grinder touches the planting strip

Nothing happens in that strip without a Tennessee 811 ticket. Three working days' notice, member utilities send their own locators, and the ticket is good for fifteen calendar days from the requested start. The part that changes how we actually work is the tolerance zone: the width of the marked facility plus two feet on each side has to be hand dug or soft dug rather than machined.

On a four-foot strip with a lateral running down the middle of it, that can mean most of the working area is hand territory. We plan for it instead of pretending it away - the stump comes down by machine to the point where the marks say stop, and the rest is done with a bar and a shovel. It is slower. It is also why we do not quote a right-of-way stump at the same rate as the identical tree standing in the back garden forty feet away.

The stump is Metro's, the broken sidewalk is yours

This is the split that surprises people most. Under Metro's code the strip and the tree in it are public, so removal goes through Urban Forestry rather than through you - but the property-maintenance duty for the walk in front of a property falls on the adjoining owner, and Metro's provisions on dangerous or defective conditions in the right-of-way sit alongside that. In plain terms: you often did not own the tree that broke your sidewalk, and you are still the one dealing with the sidewalk.

Our part of that is bounded and worth being clear about. We take out the stump and the root runs beneath the panels being replaced, finishing under the level the new base will sit at, and leave sound ground for whoever pours. We do not break out or replace concrete in the right-of-way - that is a permitted construction activity for a concrete contractor. Getting the order right, roots out then base then pour, is what stops the same crack coming back in five years.

Grinding the back-yard stumps on 11,000-square-foot lots

Away from the street the picture changes completely. The median lot here is around eleven and a half thousand square feet - flat, open, with a short driveway and usually no attached garage - which makes a back-yard stump one of the easier jobs in the county. No alley to negotiate, no slope, and generally a gate wide enough to walk a machine through in one go.

What is back there is silver maple, sweetgum, hackberry and the occasional surviving elm, plus mimosa and tree of heaven that have come up along fence lines. Mimosa and tree of heaven both resprout from roots, so they get the same treatment as a pear: below the collar, laterals chased, material removed. Sweetgum is the one people misjudge - the wood cuts easily but the root plate is broad and dense with fibrous roots, so the ground preparation afterwards takes longer than the cutting did.