Stump Grinding in Otter Wood, Forest Hills

In Otter Wood the back of your lot is a state natural area

Otter Wood sits directly against Radnor Lake State Natural Area, 1,368 acres of protected forest that became Tennessee's first state natural area in 1973. For the owners on Annandale and Wynstone that is the reason they bought here, and it is also the reason a tree job at the back of the property is not a routine tree job.

The trees along that boundary grew up inside a closed forest and then found themselves standing at the edge of a mown lawn. That does something to them. They are tall, drawn up, small in the crown and poorly tapered, because for eighty years they never had to hold themselves against wind from that direction. When one goes over, it usually does not snap - it tips, lifting a wide plate of roots and soil out of the ground with it.

So what is left behind is not a clean stump on level lawn. It is a tilted mass, a pit beside it, and a boundary line a few feet away that nothing is allowed to spill across.

A tipped plate is a different job than a cut stump

When a forest-edge tree windthrows, the tree crew cuts the trunk off the upended root mass and hauls the wood, and what stays is the plate standing on edge with a crater behind it.

That gets handled in a sequence rather than in one pass. The plate has to be cut free and worked down where it stands, because dropping it back into its own hole first just buries the problem under a foot of loose soil. Once it is reduced, the soil that came up with it goes back into the crater, compacted in layers, and the grindings crown the top.

It takes longer than a same-diameter stump that was simply cut at ground level, and it involves more dirt and therefore more wear on teeth, since soil in the wood is what dulls carbide faster than any species does. We quote it as what it is.

The park line is a hard line

Nothing goes over the boundary. Not chip, not spoil, not a limb, not a machine taking a shortcut through the understory because the ground is flatter on that side.

That means we work the stump from your lawn even where the approach would be easier from the trees, we set the discharge so the chip throws back onto the lot, and anything surplus leaves with us rather than getting pushed into the woods where it would smother whatever is growing there.

It also means we do not touch anything on the far side of the line, however dead it looks. A leaning snag over your fence from park ground is a state matter, and the right call is to raise it with the natural area rather than have a contractor quietly deal with it.

Beech has thin bark, shallow roots, and a long memory

American beech is common along this edge, along with white oak, tulip poplar and shagbark hickory, and beech is the one to be careful around.

Its roots run shallow and spread far, often grafting to neighbouring beeches, and its bark is thin enough that a knock from a machine leaves a wound that never really closes. Beech also suckers from its roots, so a beech stump ground too narrowly comes back as a ring of shoots the following year.

When we are grinding one with other beeches nearby, we work wide enough to stop the sprouting but stay off the surface roots running toward the keepers, and we mat or route the machine so it is not repeatedly tracking over the same shallow root zone. That last part matters more here than the grinding does - compaction on a lot like this is what kills the next tree.