Tree Removal in Shreveport, LA

Tree removal around Shreveport usually means a mature hardwood that has outgrown its spot or started to fail: a water oak with a hollow base, a pecan that splits at the same crotch every summer, a sweetgum lifting the driveway, or a tree that leans further after every soaking rain. Very few of these can simply be felled. On a typical city lot there is a roof, a carport, a pool or a neighbor's fence inside the tree's reach, so the tree is taken apart from the top down, and pieces too heavy to drop are lowered on ropes. How long that takes, and what it costs, depends far more on access and what is underneath than on the tree's height alone.

Signs a tree is past saving

Some trees are easy calls. A dead tree, a trunk with a long open crack, a cavity you can put your arm into, shelf-like conks or mushrooms at the root flare, or a sudden lean with the soil lifted on one side all point toward removal. LSU AgCenter notes that water oak trunks often begin to rot by about age 50, and that water oaks with shallow roots in heavy clay are prone to uprooting or snapping in high wind. Hypoxylon canker, a fungus that moves in on oaks already stressed by drought, root damage or construction, leaves patches of bark that slough off to show a gray-to-black crust; Texas A&M AgriLife describes it as a white rot that turns the tree into a hazard. Other cases are judgment calls, and if pruning or cabling would solve the problem instead, we say so.

Species that come up most

In Shreveport yards that is mainly water and willow oaks, pecans, sweetgums, hackberries, Bradford pears and Chinese tallow, plus tall pines. LSU AgCenter lists water oak, laurel oak, southern red oak, pecan, Bradford pear and Chinese elm among the least wind-resistant trees in Louisiana, and Chinese tallow is low on the list as well. Live oaks, southern magnolias and bald cypress hold up far better, which is one reason we often suggest keeping them and thinning instead.

Working close to houses and wires

Over roofs we rig limbs so they swing away from the house instead of dropping onto it, and on tight lots we cut wood small enough to carry out through a side gate. When neither a climber nor a lift can safely reach a tree that leans over a house, a crane is sometimes the safest way to lift sections clear. We do not cut near energized lines; if a tree is tangled with a power line, SWEPCO handles that part first. If a tree stands in the strip between the sidewalk and the curb, it is normally the owner's to maintain in Shreveport, but we will point out anything that looks like city right-of-way, where the Public Works forestry crew handles dead trees.

Wood, chips and the stump

You decide what stays. Oak and pecan logs can be left in rounds for firewood or hauled away; brush is chipped, and the chips can stay as mulch or leave with us. The stump is its own line on the quote. Many people grind it the same day; others wait. Hauling is worth settling up front: Shreveport's bulky-item pickup does not collect debris left by contractors and never takes stumps or roots, so the quote says who removes what.

Louisiana paperwork

Louisiana requires anyone removing or trimming trees for pay to hold a state Horticulture Commission arborist license and to work under a written agreement that spells out the work and the price. Your quote from us is that agreement, and nothing outside it gets cut.