I am looking at a house to buy which has one third of its half acre backyard covered in aboout 40 or so tall pine trees. As you can guessed backyard looks quite neglected and I guess thats because its difficult to grow anything there. Should I buy this property. How about spending on removing some of those trees. Thanks BK
Also check to see if you are permitted to remove the trees, and how much the removal permit would be.\
"Neglected" by what standard? Do you mean it doesn't have a boring blanket of golf-course-like grass? Do you find woodlands to look "neglected" by default? If that's the case, don't buy the property.
You've already proved your guess it's difficult to grow anything there to be wrong. 40 or so tall pine trees are growing there.
In most neighborhoods, if you cut down a stand of trees like that just because you think woodlands look "neglected", you would quickly become known as the anti-social neighbor who cut down the trees. Let someone more interested in maintaining the stand of trees buy the property. Go someplace else. Someplace where clear-cutting is liked.
Instead of paying someone to remove them, how about getting paid by someone for the pulpwood or lumber the trees produce? Beau
You didn't say where you are located but if you are in the southeastern US, you can probably have a lovely azalea garden under those pine trees.
If you like it buy it..... Could you put a woodland garden in without the removal of trees? I for one am not fond of a nice green grass lawn, I'd much rather have pathways and greenery with flowers in my yard. It's a thought... My best friend is in a similar situation and I asked the same thing of her.... told her she should take all her leaves (from the front yard) and spread them out back till next year to add organic material and start planting away. Colleen Zone s CT
I have a friend in Myrtle Beach that is having several tall pines removed. Storms have him worried because trees can break in half and top come spearing through your roof. Think he's paying $3 or $6 thousand to have done. While trees are big, they are tough to harvest, i.e. have to be cut in sections, and are not worth the lumber value. Pine is also no good as firewood. Frank
I vote no. You have a large backyard which you don't like the looks of. You'll have to spend a lot of money altering it -- not just for removing the trees, but for renovating the "neglect" and making it look the way you think it should. Buy a house where you can work with the existing landscape, not against it.
He said "some of those trees". He didn't say he wanted a golf course.
In an actual forest, some pine trees end up low on the pecking order when it comes to sufficient light, and they end up stunted & ugly, or dead. On the way to dead, they look ugly. There's nothing pretty about a 30 foot tree with 3 branches, although it's nice to see how much the woodpeckers enjoy the resident bugs.
On a half acre residential property, there's no reason no to carefully thin out the ugly and leave what looks good. It's called GARDENING.
What are the redeeming qualities of the property? Are they compelling enough to make you comfortable with spending some serious money to have some of the trees removed?
If you remove the trees, you may end up with lots of stumps that are uglier than the trees.
Janet
Doug Kanter wrote:
That's just a matter of hiring the right tree removal service, Janet. Stump removal isn't a big deal.
If the trees have not been tended to (ie: thinned) properly for a long time, it is quite possible that a good storm could topple them ALL. Pines are shallow rooted and tend to go down like dominos. I once saw an entire hillside with a 40' swatch of downed pines that ran from bottom to almost the top. Some tree maintenance might be a good idea even if you don't plan on removing them all.
Giselle (who even on a recently maintained/logged property lost about 10 hardwood trees to wind this year)
Where was this?
I happen to think stumps are beautiful. I'd leave several heights from four feet to ten feet for variety These will become trellises for, say, banks roses, or longer-blooming types of climbing roses, or large vines that would turn the stumps into the appearance of towers of foliage. The top of the some of the stumps can be hollowed out to use for planters, especially for huckleberry shrubs which LOVE to grow out of decaying stumps better than any place else they could be planted.
But one should also always bare in mind it takes decades to grow a nice-sized pine tree for oneself, though only one afternoon with a chainsaw to deprive oneself of trees altogether. Cleaning up the undergrowth could well be enough to make it all quite lovely, & installing substory native shrubs & cultivated forms of semi-shade loving flowering shrubs that would enjoy life in naturally acidic soils undre pines, with natural tamped paths & installed flagstone trails winding about under the pines, & drifts of crocuses at the driplines of all the trees, scillas & cyclamens in the shadier spots closer in under the pines.
-paghat the ratgirl
Indiana. We had a hell of a storm in late August (iirc). We were without power for four days and when you are on well water, that gets annoying really, really fast.
Giselle ( nevermind having to cut your way out of your 1/5 of a mile long, tree covered driveway)
I find it hard to belive a pine has a shallow root system...during Ivan and many other hurricanes its always been th pines that stood the test of the wind and rains. Yes, they may have hgad a top snap out but none ever blew down at the root level...............I lost more large oaks and hickory with Ivan than I care to think about......I was pretty paranoid with the pines around my house (long leaf pines most over 90 feet in height), but only lost a limb or two, but the oaks and hickory were another story.......nothing but massive holes where the entire root system came up when the tree went over........
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On Tue, 2 Nov 2004 17:47:12 -0500, Roy wrote
I think there are some, but I agree that those I'm familiar with all have tap roots. In the SE US, the problem with pines is that they can be brittle. Many years ago a tornado went through my parents' neighborhood, not quite touching the ground. You could follow the path by all the pines broken off 30'-40' up. These were mostly loblollly; I suspect that longleaf would have sustained less damage.
Sweet gum also have strong tap roots but are brittle and fall after breaking.
I've read experts say that hickories are strong. But you say you lost hickories, and a 2' diameter hickory destroyed my mom's carport (same house 25 years after the tornado) during a completely calm spell after Jeanne passed over. Pulled up the root ball.
Southern live oaks generally do well. (For those on the west coast, this is NOT the same oak that's called a live oak there. Any evergreen oak is likely to be called a live oak.) But water oaks are notorious for rotting in the center with no visible damage, and several of them fell around my mom's house this year, luckily none on the house.
Edward
I should have stated my soil is very sandy, and we had gone many many weeks without rain so when Ivan came through the initial rain soaked right in the ground and soon became pretty darn water logged. Coupled with the high winds it did not take much to layover fully grown mature oaks and hickory trees. Especially with as much of a canopy as they had.......probably would have been a lot different if the leaves were mostly gone like in late fall or winter, but thats not when hurricane season is........unfortunately.
Just because a tree does not blow over does not mean it did not get injured in a heavy blow either. Its not uncommon for a well rooted tree to have its roots fractured and die later on months after it incurred its injury........Tornadoes are terrible on pine trees but then again they usually stay firmly rooted and only get snapped off about 1/3 or 1/2 the way up. To the best of my knowlege the loblolly, sugar, yellow, long leaf, short leaf and virginia pines all have pretty darn long tap roots. I have seen spruce and fir trees blown over when I lived up north.
Back in 1995 when Huricane Opal came through I was pretty paranoid. I just had visions of all thes epines laying on the house. Next morning after Opal was over, I was surprised to find only one small oak blown over, and one top of one pine snapped out..All the others had a pretty good curve to them from the winds effects, but they did straighten back up without any ill effects. Then my son cam up tome and told me that the "Civil War" tree was blown over.........never in a million years would I have expected that tree to get blown over or broke.....It was a monsterous oak that measured close to 58" at DBH.........and would have made the states record book if its canopy was just a bit larger, and better shaped. Sure enough that tree was broken off about 30 feet up the trunk and the entire trunk was hollow. The cavity was large enough that 3 adults and two children could get inside it............We did count 237 growth rings, in one sectioin of thre trunk though. It was hard to count them rings, and there was still quite a few we cold not count due to the cavity and tree's condition after breaking. We used to call it the civil war tree due to its size, we just knew it had to be planted and growing back during that time frame..... Visit my website:
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