Stump Grinding by Neighborhood in Forest Hills, TN
Nine square miles, and no two pockets of it grind the same way. Find your subdivision and you get the version of this that applies to your own street.
How the map runs from where we start the day
We are based inside the city, so nothing here is a trip. The Hillsboro Pike side - Chickering Park, Bancroft, Castlewood, Hillsboro Park - is two or three minutes, and those are the jobs we can slot into a gap in the afternoon. The middle of the city off Tyne Boulevard, meaning Chickering Valley, Chickering Hills, Tynewood Estates and Tyne Meade, runs four or five.
The Granny White and Otter Creek side takes longest, six or seven minutes to Tyne Valley Estates, Hounds Run, Otter Creek Road and Otter Wood, and those are also the lots most likely to need a look in person before a number goes out, because that is where the grades and the long drives are.
None of it changes the price. A four-minute drive and a seven-minute drive are the same drive. What changes the price is what is between the trailer and the stump once we get there.
The 1959 core and the rebuilt lots are different work
Forest Hills has two housing stories running at once and they produce two kinds of job.
The original core - Chickering Valley built entirely in 1958 and 1959, Tynewood Estates mostly 1961, Hillsboro Park with a median year of 1959 - is one enormous cohort of houses with one enormous cohort of trees planted at the same time. Those trees are soft-wooded, wide at the base, and sitting on top of utilities and concrete of exactly the same age. It is predictable work and the surprises come from what is buried.
The rebuild pockets behave nothing like that. On Crater Hill Drive, in Tyne Meade and on the newer end of Otter Wood, we are working around builders, finished irrigated landscaping, compacted ground and construction schedules. Same city, different day entirely.
The city sets the tree rules here, not Metro
Forest Hills incorporated in 1957 and declined to dissolve when Nashville and Davidson County consolidated in 1963, so it still runs its own commission, zoning and permit desk from City Hall at 6300 Hillsboro Pike. Tree work here goes through the city.
The practical version: removing a living tree of eight inches caliper or more needs a permit, which is free and applies to homeowners and contractors alike. Dead trees, storm-fallen trees and listed invasives are exempt. Fall below your district's canopy retention ratio and a planting plan is required, with healthy native trees replaced inch for inch by something similar. Clear-cutting is prohibited outright.
The other thing worth knowing is what the city will not do. Its chipper and brush service takes limbs to eight inches and bagged leaves from the curb, but it will not take root balls, contractor debris, or anything at all from inside your property line.
- Chickering ValleyOne 1959 planting, all failing in the same decade
- Chickering ParkPike-facing lots where canopy rules follow the removal
- Chickering HillsTeardown pocket off Tyne Blvd, grinds on a builder's clock
- BancroftGated estates where screening trees are aging out
- CastlewoodOne cul-de-sac, splitting pears, everything staged on the bulb
- Tyne MeadeBiggest houses, smallest lots, side yards that decide the machine
- Tyne Valley EstatesGranny White's steep side, stumps sitting below the house
- Tynewood Estates1961 brick ranches over sixty-year-old clay laterals
- Hounds RunFour streets, one builder's plant list, all aging together
- Otter WoodSemi-gated lots ending at the Radnor Lake boundary
- Hillsboro Park1959 walks lifted by the maples that shade them
- Otter Creek RoadCentury oaks, four-foot stumps, long private drives
- Old Hickory BoulevardDry-stack walls, 1798 houses, and equipment kept off both
Other Davidson County stops from Forest Hills
Before you pick your street
My subdivision is not on this list. Do you still come?
Yes. We work the whole city and the pages here are just the pockets people search for by name. If you are inside the Forest Hills limits - anywhere between Old Hickory Boulevard, Granny White Pike, Harding Place and the Belle Meade line - you are in the service area, and the nearest listed neighborhood will usually describe your ground reasonably well anyway.
Does it cost more on one side of the city than the other?
No. Everything inside the city is within about seven minutes of us, and we do not price by postcode. What genuinely moves a number is the diameter and species of the stump, how far it is from where a trailer can park, whether a machine can drive to it or has to be walked in, and whether the grindings stay or go.
Can you tell me a price over the phone?
For a straightforward stump in reachable lawn, usually - send a photo with something recognisable beside it for scale and you will have a firm figure back the same weekday. For a big hardwood, a steep downhill lot or a stump at the end of a long private drive, we would rather come and measure. A twenty-minute visit beats a number that has to be revised on the day.
How far out are you booking?
Ordinary grinding work goes on the calendar three to five working days ahead most of the year, longer after a big storm week when everybody in the county is calling at once. Anything that has fallen on a house, a car or the only way off a property gets looked at same day or next. We would rather keep that list short so it stays meaningful.