Stump Grinding in Meadows of Seven Points, Hermitage

They were planted together and they are failing together

Somebody planted callery pears down these streets between 2001 and 2004, the same way half of Middle Tennessee did that decade, and they are all reaching the end at once. It is not disease and it is not the soil. It is the way the tree is built: a dozen limbs leaving the trunk at the same height at a narrow angle, with bark folded into every union. Twenty-odd years of growth turns those unions into wedges, and then one ice storm or one hard July gust takes half the crown off.

What people notice first is a torn wound running down the trunk. What they do about it, usually, is have the whole tree taken out rather than pay to reduce and cable a tree that will do it again. So the stump appears, and then the neighbor's stump appears, and by the end of a bad winter there are three or four on the same short street.

And they are all in the worst possible place: the strip between the sidewalk and the curb, where a mail carrier walks, a trash cart rolls, and the sprinkler line runs.

Working the strip between the walk and the street

That planted strip is typically four to six feet wide, which is enough room for a walk-behind machine and not much else. Concrete on one side, asphalt on the other, and a wheel that throws material hard in whatever direction it is pointed. Anything not shielded gets peppered.

So the setup is half the job. Plywood along the sidewalk edge, a rubber mat on the curb side, cones out because these cul-de-sacs have kids on bikes, and the cut worked in shallow lifts rather than one aggressive plunge. We keep a shovel going the whole time to clear thrown material out of the cut instead of letting it build a berm the wheel then re-grinds.

Curb strips also hide things. Irrigation lateral pipe crossing to the mow strip, a lighting run to the mailbox lamp, sometimes a shallow cable drop. The Tennessee 811 request covers the utility-owned lines and takes three working days. Everything the homeowner or the builder put in is unmarked, so if you know your sprinkler head positions, mark them with flags from the hardware store before we come.

Pie-shaped lots, and what that means for getting to the back

This subdivision is built on cul-de-sac bulbs, so the lots are wide at the street and pinch to a narrow point at the rear. That geometry is great for a front yard and unhelpful behind the house, where two neighboring properties converge and the side gaps between houses shrink as you go back.

When the stump is a pin oak or a red maple in the back rather than a pear out front, we plan the entry rather than assume it. Frequently the easiest path to a rear stump is not down your side of the house at all but along the wider neighbor's side, and a two-minute conversation with them the day before saves an hour of awkwardness on the day.

The Leyland cypress screens along the rear lines are their own small nuisance. They were planted three feet apart in 2003, they are now a solid wall, and when one dies in the middle of the row the stump is boxed in by living trees on both sides. Those we usually do by hand-cutting an access lane through one neighbor tree's lower limbs and grinding through the gap.

Four pears cost far less than four times one pear

Pear stumps are small. Most of what comes out of these curb strips is a ten to sixteen inch trunk with a shallow, compact root system, and on its own that is the low end of the price scale, in the neighborhood of $100 to $175 with a minimum service charge in play.

The real number, though, depends entirely on how many there are. Getting the truck and trailer down New Hope Road and unloaded is a fixed cost we only want to pay once. Three pears on the same street, whether they are all yours or shared between houses, come in dramatically better per stump than one on its own, and this neighborhood is the single best candidate in Hermitage for a group booking.

If you are the one organizing it, get photos of each stump with a tape or a shoe in frame, note which are in the curb strip and which are in a yard, and send them together. One visit, one price, no per-house minimum stacked on top of another.