Fort Lauderdale Tree Service

Tree work in a city built around water

Fort Lauderdale is a hard place to be a tree company and an easy place to be a bad one. Lots in Victoria Park, Rio Vista and Tarpon River are narrow, the house is close to the property line, and the big live oak or black olive in the back yard is often wedged between a pool cage, a seawall and the neighbor's roof. Add canal frontage, where there is no truck access at all, and a careless crew can put a limb through something expensive in seconds.

We do this work the way it has to be done here: climbers rigging and lowering limbs in sections, a crane when a tree cannot be climbed or dropped safely, and a chipper on the street so nothing stays on the lawn. Our estimates are itemized and free, and the crew that quotes the job is the crew that shows up.

Tree services we provide in Fort Lauderdale

• Tree trimming & pruning - canopy raising over Las Olas-area sidewalks and driveways, deadwooding big oaks, thinning so wind passes through instead of pushing the tree over.
• Tree removal - controlled takedowns in Victoria Park and Rio Vista yards where there is no room to drop anything, including canal-side trees reached from the water side.
• Stump grinding - stumps ground below grade so you can re-sod or replant, which the city will usually require after a removal.
• Palm trimming - royal, coconut and foxtail palms cleaned without over-stripping, and coconuts removed before storm season on beachside and Harbor Beach properties.
• Storm & emergency service - fallen limbs and uprooted trees cleared after summer storms and hurricanes, with the city's storm-debris rules in mind.
• Lot & land clearing - overgrown lots and teardown sites cleared for new construction, with protected trees flagged before anything comes down.

Fort Lauderdale neighborhoods and the trees in them

East of Federal Highway the canopy is old. Victoria Park, Rio Vista, Colee Hammock and Sailboat Bend were planted in the 1920s through the 1950s, and the live oaks, black olives, mahoganies and ficus there are now fifty to a hundred years old. They are beautiful, they are protected, and many of them have never been structurally pruned. We see codominant trunks with included bark, limbs reaching over roofs, and roots lifting driveways. Most of these trees should be kept and corrected, not removed.

Along the Intracoastal and in Harbor Beach, Las Olas Isles, Coral Ridge and Lauderdale Isles, salt is the issue. Coconut and royal palms do well, but black olives and ficus on the exposed side of a lot thin out and die back. Canal lots also mean one side of every tree is unreachable by truck, so limbs over the water are rigged and brought back to the yard or taken by barge.

West of the airport and in Imperial Point, Coral Ridge Isles and the Plantation border, the homes are 1960s and 1970s ranches with planted black olives and oaks that have outgrown the swale. The city's own trees in the right-of-way are not yours to trim, and we will tell you which is which before we start.

Tree removal permits in Fort Lauderdale

The City of Fort Lauderdale requires a tree removal permit for trees 8 inches in trunk diameter and larger on a developed single-family lot, and for trees 3 inches and larger on any site being redeveloped. Removal normally comes with a replacement requirement, and a tree taken out without a permit must be replaced with the largest tree reasonably available. Nuisance species are exempt, including Brazilian pepper, Australian pine, melaleuca, carrotwood, schefflera, Norfolk Island pine, earleaf acacia and bischofia. We identify which category your tree falls into on the estimate visit and handle the application as part of the job. Our guide to tree removal permits in Broward County explains the county layer underneath the city rules.

Storm season on a coastal lot

Fort Lauderdale takes hurricane wind off the ocean first, and the trees that fail are predictable: top-heavy black olives that were never thinned, ficus with shallow root plates, coconuts loaded with fruit, and dead fronds and limbs that become projectiles. The work that prevents damage is done in April and May, not in October. We thin canopies so wind moves through them, raise limbs off roofs, remove coconuts and dead palm fronds, and take out trees that are already failing. After a storm, we prioritize trees on houses and cars, clear driveways, and cut debris to the lengths the city's collection crews will accept.