Tree Removal and Arborist Services in Crows Nest

Tree work where every square metre is used

Crows Nest packs a lot into a small area. There's the busy village centre with shops and apartments over them, and around it older residential streets of terraces, semis and cottages on narrow lots. Parts of the suburb sit within North Sydney Council's Holtermann Estate heritage conservation areas. Gardens here are small, and the trees in them are often older than the extensions built around them.

The whole of Crows Nest is in North Sydney Council, so one set of tree rules applies wherever you are in the suburb. They're set lower than many people expect. A tree only has to be more than 5 metres high, or have a crown more than 5 metres wide, to need a permit, and plenty of courtyard trees are well past that.

Street trees do a lot of the work of greening the suburb. Lower North Shore streets are commonly planted with Lophostemon confertus (Brushbox) and Jacaranda mimosifolia (Jacaranda), and these grow out over front gardens, roofs and power lines. A street tree belongs to council. North Sydney Council needs to approve work on trees on public land at any size, so even a small cut to a street tree's branches is a question for council before it's one for us.

We'd rather keep a tree than take it out, and on a small block that usually means careful pruning. North Sydney allows small maintenance cuts without a permit, including branches within 1 metre of the house, which often solves a gutter or wall problem on its own. Where a tree genuinely has to go, we take it down in pieces small enough to carry out through the house or the side passage.

• Whole suburb under North Sydney Council: one set of rules
• Trees lowered in sections on ropes, nothing dropped
• Pieces cut to fit your side passage or hallway
• Written dead-tree confirmation from an AQF 3 arborist
• Our own stump grinder: 74 cm wide, fits a standard gate
• All pruning to AS 4373, which council requires
• Fully insured: $20M public liability and workers compensation

Stumps out of courtyards and back gardens

In a small Crows Nest garden a stump takes up space you can't spare. It's where the new paving should go, or the planter box, or the replacement tree. Getting a machine to it is the hard part, because the only way in is usually a side gate beside the house.

The stump grinder is ours, a Bandit SG40 that measures 74 cm across its tracks, so a standard side gate is wide enough. If your side passage is narrower than that, or the only route is through the house, Alex will measure it at the quote and tell you straight what can be done.

When we take a tree out, we can grind the stump on the same visit, so you aren't waiting for a hire machine or a second crew. We also come out for a single stump. One old stump in a courtyard is a perfectly good reason to call.

Where there's sandstone under the garden, the grinder can only go down as far as the rock. We check for it before we quote and tell you how deep we expect to get. More about stump grinding