Plantation Tree Service

A city that lives under its oaks

Plantation is a Tree City USA that takes the title seriously. The live oaks along Broward Boulevard and through the older neighborhoods east of University Drive were planted in the 1950s and 1960s and now form a continuous canopy over the streets, and the city's landscape code is built around keeping it. A removal here needs a permit, a boundary survey showing the tree, and a replacement planted to the city's minimum size, and the stump has to be ground below grade. We know the code and we work inside it.

Most of what we do in Plantation is not removal. It is structural pruning on big oaks that have never been properly thinned, reducing limbs that have grown out over roofs, deadwooding before storm season, and keeping the black olives and mahoganies in the 1970s neighborhoods off the house. When a tree really does need to come out, we document why, pull the permit, and plant the replacement.

Tree services we provide in Plantation

• Tree trimming & pruning - structural pruning, weight reduction and deadwooding on Plantation's mature live oaks, done to keep the canopy, not top it.
• Tree removal - permitted removals with the boundary survey, city application and replacement tree handled, and a crane for oaks that cannot be climbed.
• Stump grinding - stumps ground below grade, which the city requires after every permitted removal.
• Palm trimming - royal, queen and sabal palms cleaned in Jacaranda, Plantation Isles and the Central Park neighborhoods.
• Storm & emergency service - big oak limbs and whole trees off houses after storms, with the arborist available to document a hazardous tree for permit-free removal.
• Lot & land clearing - acreage in Plantation Acres cleared of brush and exotics with the protected oaks and pines flagged first.

Plantation neighborhoods and the trees in them

East Plantation, from State Road 7 to University Drive around Broward Boulevard and Peters Road, is the original city, built in the 1950s and 1960s with live oaks planted in every swale. Those oaks are now seventy years old, with trunks three feet across and limbs reaching across the street. Plantation Park, Plantation Gardens and the neighborhoods around Plantation Central Park have the same era of trees on quarter-acre lots, plus black olives and banyans that have outgrown everything around them. The work is careful pruning and the occasional crane removal of a tree that has finally failed.

Jacaranda, Plantation Isles and Hawks Landing, west of University, are 1970s through 1990s golf and canal communities with planted oaks, mahoganies, black olives and royal palms on smaller lots, and the common calls are limbs on roofs, roots in pool decks, and palms that were never cleaned. Plantation Acres, out past Flamingo Road, is the rural end of the city: one-acre and larger lots, horses allowed, native slash pines and oaks, and property lines overgrown with melaleuca and Brazilian pepper. Land clearing and dead-pine removal are the usual work there.

Tree removal permits in Plantation

Plantation requires a tree removal or relocation permit through the Planning and Zoning Department's Landscape Division before a tree comes down. For a single-family home the application needs a boundary survey marking the tree to be removed and where the replacement will go, and the replacement has to meet the city's minimum: 12 feet tall, 6 feet of spread and a 2.5-inch caliper, mulched, planted to the city's guidelines. The stump must be ground below grade. Relocation permits require a cash bond based on the tree's appraised value to guarantee it survives. The one exemption: a tree on residential property does not need a permit if an ISA Certified Arborist or a Florida landscape architect documents that it is a danger to people or property, and our arborist provides that assessment when it applies. We prepare the survey markup, the application and the replacement plan with the estimate. Our Broward tree permit guide covers the county rules.

Storm season under a seventy-year-old canopy

Plantation's old oaks are the strongest trees in the county when they are sound and thinned, and the most dangerous when they are not. The failures in Wilma and Irma were predictable: huge limbs that had grown out horizontally over roofs with no reduction in decades, codominant trunks with included bark that split at the union, and black olives and ficus with sail-like canopies on shallow roots. Spring is for weight reduction on long limbs, cabling where a split is starting, deadwooding and thinning. After a storm we work trees off houses first, then clear streets and driveways, and cut debris to the lengths the city's haulers will take.