Where We Work in Buncombe and Henderson County

Arden is our home base, and a lot of the calls here come from subdivisions built between the 1980s and the 2000s. Builders planted white pines close to foundations and along property lines, and forty years later those pines are seventy feet tall with shallow roots, sitting a few feet off a bedroom wall. They shed limbs, they lean after a wet fall, and they are the trees most likely to come over in a wind event.

Lots here are often flat enough for the bucket truck to set up but tight enough that sections have to come out over a driveway or a fence. That combination is exactly what the truck and the rigging are for.

Asheville's older neighborhoods have the biggest trees and the worst access. Steep wooded lots, houses tucked into banks, and mature oaks and poplars standing directly over rooflines with no drop zone anywhere. Backyards are often gate-only, so the work is done on rope and saddle with everything lowered piece by piece and carried out front.

Hemlock loss has changed a lot of these properties too. Standing dead hemlocks turn brittle, and brittle wood is not climbable, so those come out from the bucket or with a crane-assisted pick instead.

Around Hendersonville we do a lot of work on old orchard ground and farm edges, where big hardwoods line the property boundary and have been growing without pruning for decades. Those trees carry heavy horizontal limbs and a lot of deadwood, and they tend to fail at the union rather than at the root.

Newer building on former orchard land brings the other half of the work: clearing for a pad and driveway, then keeping the specimen trees that got left standing healthy enough to stay.

Fletcher looks a lot like Arden from a tree perspective. Neighborhood pines planted too close to the house, plus pasture-edge hardwoods that shade fence lines and outbuildings. The mix means one visit often covers a removal near the house and pruning on an old shade tree out back.

Open ground here also means better access, so the skid steer and chipper can work close and the wood leaves the same day instead of sitting in a pile.

Mills River is farm country with river bottom, and wet ground is the thing that shapes the work. Trees in saturated soil hold poorly, especially after a long rain, and a lean that looked stable in July can become a problem in a soft February. Root plates that have started to lift are worth a look before wind finds them.

We also get called for storm-broken hardwoods along field edges and driveways, where a tree is not threatening a house but is dropping limbs where people and equipment pass.