Stump Grinding in Tulip Grove, Hermitage

Six years on, the tornado stumps are still in the yards

On the night of March 3, 2020, the same system that flattened Stanford Estates and killed two people on Catalpa Drive in Mt. Juliet came through here at high-end EF2 and worked its way down Tulip Grove Road. Roofs got fixed. Fences got replaced. The Kroger and the Panera reopened. What did not get dealt with, in yard after yard along Andrew Jackson Parkway and the state-named streets behind it, is the wood.

Those trees were not cut down on a schedule by a crew with time to do it neatly. They were snapped, or topped, or dropped in an emergency by whoever could get a saw in fast, and what got left is a stump cut at eighteen inches instead of two, with the root plate already tipped on one side and a mound of soil heaved up with it. Six years of grass has grown over that mound so it reads as landscaping now, right up until a mower deck finds the edge of it.

The calls we get are the practical ones. Someone is finally re-sodding the back yard and cannot bring the grade in. A buyer's inspector flagged the leaning mass in the side yard. The kids are older and the trip hazard by the swing set has stopped being tolerable. All of it is the same night, still sitting there.

A storm stump is a different job than a stump somebody planned for

Three things separate them, and all three change the price. First, the cut height: a jagged eighteen-inch stub has to come down to something workable before the wheel can even start, and if it is split into two lobes the machine has to attack each one separately. Second, the root plate. When a tree tips and does not fully go over, one whole side of the root system lifts out of the soil and hangs in the air with dirt and rock packed into it. Grinding that means feeding through soil, not just wood, and soil eats teeth in a way clean hardwood does not.

Third is what is buried around the base. Fence wire, a chunk of somebody's soffit, roofing nails, a section of gutter, half a swing set. We have pulled all of it out of Tulip Grove root balls. That is why we walk the base with a hand rake before starting instead of trusting a photo, and why we do not quote storm stumps at the same rate as a clean removal.

The older streets and the nineties phases grind differently

Tulip Grove was built across thirty years and it shows. The original core along Albany, Dutchmans, Netherlands and Topeka is 1967 through the late seventies: brick ranch and split-level, mature silver maple and water oak, hackberry volunteering along the back lines, and the occasional tulip poplar that lives up to the neighborhood's name.

The infill that came later, the two-story frame and vinyl houses of the late eighties and nineties, got a different planting list. That era ran on Bradford pear, and those are failing now for a reason that has nothing to do with weather. The branch structure splits at the crotch under its own weight, usually after an ice event, and the homeowner takes the whole thing rather than watch it come apart in pieces. Pear stumps are small, fast and cheap by comparison with anything on the older streets.

So the same street name can produce a $150 job at one end and a $600 job at the other. It depends entirely on which decade planted the tree.

Grinding around the mansion, the school and the park traffic

Tulip Grove Elementary sets the rhythm of this neighborhood on a weekday, and the roads feeding Andrew Jackson's Hermitage carry visitor traffic a Nashville crew does not always anticipate. We stage the trailer accordingly: nothing parks where it pinches Tulip Grove Road during the morning run, and if your driveway is short we would rather back in early and stay put than shuffle equipment at noon. The 1836 Tulip Grove mansion and the estate grounds beyond it are a separate world with their own caretakers, but the traffic they generate lands on your street.

What it costs to clear the last of the 2020 damage

Most of what is left in Tulip Grove is mid-size to large hardwood, which puts a single stump somewhere between $175 and $350 for a moderate trunk and $350 to $700 for a mature maple or oak with a spread base. Storm damage sits at the upper end of its bracket because of the dirt, the debris and the extra setup a lifted plate demands.

Better news: this neighborhood almost never has just one. If you have two or three left over from the same night, and plenty of houses along Andrew Jackson Parkway do, the second and third come in materially cheaper because the trailer only makes one trip. Photograph all of them at once with something in frame for scale, and you get one number covering the lot rather than three quotes that add up to more.