Tree Removal
Taking down oaks, poplars, and pines over Piedmont housing, from a dead dogwood in a side yard to a hundred-foot tulip poplar leaning at a roofline
Tree service in Winston-Salem
Tell us what the tree is doing and a vetted local tree company calls you back with a free quote. No obligation, and the price comes in writing.
Winston-Salem · Clemmons · Forsyth County
Tree Work
The five jobs that make up tree work here
Removal, pruning, stump grinding, storm response, and clearing. Each page below covers what the work involves, what it costs in this market, and the point at which it stops being the right answer.
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Tree Trimming and Pruning
Deadwood, weight reduction, and clearance pruning matched to how Piedmont hardwoods grow and to the ice that eventually tests them
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Stump Grinding
Grinding stumps and surface roots out of Piedmont clay so the ground can be graded, seeded, or planted again
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Storm Damage Tree Work
Clearing trees off houses, drives, and fences after ice and wind, and sorting what has to move now from what can wait a week
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Lot and Brush Clearing
Opening up overgrown ground, fence lines, and back sections choked with privet, sweetgum whips, and honeysuckle
How It Works
Call to written price, in four moves
No mystery about what comes next at any point in it.
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Tell us what the tree is doing
Call or send the quote form. Useful details: roughly how tall, what species if you know it, what it stands over, whether anything has dropped recently, and how a truck would reach it.
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A local tree crew follows up
We connect you with a vetted local tree company, and they get in touch to arrange a walk of the property.
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A look at the tree, then a written price
The visit covers the trunk and root flare, the crown and its attachments, what the tree overhangs, and whether a bucket truck can reach it. The price follows in writing with the scope spelled out.
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Decide with the number in front of you
The guides here cover what each job costs in this market, why Piedmont hardwood fails the way it does, and which trees need attention this season rather than in three years.
Questions Winston-Salem homeowners ask
What does tree removal cost in Winston-Salem?
Height sets the bracket and access decides the rest. A tree under thirty feet commonly runs $250 to $700. Thirty to sixty feet is usually $700 to $1,700. Sixty to eighty feet, which covers most mature neighborhood oaks here, runs about $1,700 to $3,800. The biggest tulip poplars and old white oaks, over eighty feet, run $3,800 to $8,000 and higher once a crane is involved. Stump grinding is separate and most residential stumps land between $100 and $450. The price that counts is the written one after somebody has walked the property.
Do I need a permit to remove a tree from my own yard?
Not for a tree standing entirely on your private residential property. Winston-Salem handles trees through the Unified Development Ordinance, and the tree preservation requirements in UDO Section B.3-4.2 apply to development projects that need a land disturbing permit rather than to a homeowner taking a tree out of a back yard. The distinction that matters is public versus private. The strip between the sidewalk and the street is city right-of-way, and the city Urban Forestry program cares for trees on city property and enforces the tree ordinances.
Why do so many trees come down here in winter?
Freezing rain. The Piedmont sits in the part of the country where winter storms often arrive as glaze rather than snow, and glaze coats every twig in the crown. In December 2002 the North Carolina Utilities Commission recorded up to an inch of ice across forty counties, with about two million electric customers affected. An inch of radial ice adds roughly seventy-five pounds to a single twenty-foot limb before you count the twigs, and a crown holds hundreds of limbs. The trees that come apart are the ones with long horizontal reach and tight forks.
Which trees around Winston-Salem give the most trouble?
Water oak, first. It is widely planted, grows quickly, and develops internal decay earlier than white oak does, so streets planted with it in the 1960s now have a whole cohort at the same stage. Callery pear, sold for decades as Bradford, splits at its crowded branch unions almost as a matter of course and is now recognized as invasive in North Carolina. Silver maple and pine round out the list in ice events. Tulip poplar is not weak, but it grows very tall very fast, which puts a lot of weight a long way up.
Can I put the debris out for city collection?
Only if you cut it yourself. Winston-Salem collects residential brush, with limbs no larger than six inches wide and six feet long, stacked at the curb with the cut ends facing the same direction. But the city does not collect brush cut by contractors or commercial services, and it does not collect from vacant lots. Anything a crew cuts leaves with the crew, and that haul-away belongs on the written quote rather than turning up as a surprise.
How do I get a quote?
Call (336) 729-8100 or send the quote form with a description of the tree: rough height, what it stands over, whether anything has come down recently, and how a truck would reach it. A local tree company follows up, walks the property, and puts a price together in writing with the scope on it. The visit and the quote are free.
The Canopy Over This City
Big hardwood, thin topsoil, and a winter that arrives as ice
Winston-Salem is a wooded city, and the city's own figures say so: Urban Forestry puts the tree canopy at 47.28 percent averaged across the eight wards, against a recommended density of 40 percent for cities in the eastern United States and a national average of 27.1 percent. City crews manage more than 100,000 trees on public land, and the city has held Tree City USA status for close to twenty-five years. Most of what stands over private yards is the same Piedmont hardwood: willow and water oak along the older streets, white oak and southern red oak where woods were left standing, tulip poplar in the moister hollows, sweetgum and red maple filling in everywhere else, and loblolly pine wherever a field went back to woods.
Underneath them is Cecil, the soil North Carolina made its state soil in 1997: roughly a foot of sandy loam over red kaolinitic clay that runs several feet down. Trees respond to that by rooting shallow and wide rather than deep. The absorbing roots sit in the top layer and spread well beyond the crown, which is why a utility trench on one side of a trunk, or a season of equipment traffic during a build, changes a tree's future in ways that only become visible five years later.
Then there is the ice. The Piedmont sits where winter storms often arrive as freezing rain rather than snow, and glaze coats every twig in a leafless crown. That is what took the region apart in December 2002, and it is what the ice storm guide works through, alongside what a failing tree looks like before it fails and what the work costs here.
Around the City
Winston-Salem by planting era, not by zip code
Street trees were planted in waves, and a wave planted together reaches the end of its comfortable life together. That is the single most useful thing to know about tree work in an older neighborhood here, and it explains why limb drops arrive in clusters across neighboring properties rather than one at a time.
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West End
One of the city's oldest residential districts, with housing running back into the late 1800s and street trees to match. Big canopy, narrow lots, and buildings worth protecting, so the work here leans toward reduction rather than removal.
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Ardmore
Listed as a National Register historic district in 2004. Dense streets of early and mid-century houses under mature hardwood, where the recurring question is clearance: limbs over roofs, over service drops, and over cars that have nowhere else to park.
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Buena Vista
Larger lots and a heavier canopy than most of the city carries. Trees here have had room to spread, which produces better structure and also produces very long horizontal limbs, and long limbs are what ice finds.
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Washington Park
An older neighborhood south of downtown on rolling ground near Salem Creek. Slope and a creek bottom in the same place means wetter soil in the low sections, and wet soil holds a root plate less firmly than dry soil does.
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Old Salem
On the National Register since 1966. Old buildings, old trees, and very little space between them, which makes rigging rather than felling the default and makes anything worth confirming with the city worth confirming first.
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Reynolda and Mount Tabor
North and northwest, with the Reynolda historic district listed in 1980. Heavy mature canopy over post-war and later housing, and enough back-yard trees with no equipment route to make climbing work routine here.
Beyond the city, coverage runs across Forsyth County to Clemmons, Kernersville, Lewisville, Rural Hall, Walkertown, Pfafftown, Tobaccoville, and Bethania, north to King, and southwest across the Yadkin to Advance. See every area covered.
Before The Saws Start
What belongs on a tree quote
Tree pricing looks arbitrary from the outside because two trees of the same height can be three times apart in cost. The variables are all visible once you know to look for them, and a quote that names them is a quote you can weigh against another one.
Established local crews work this way, and their numbers arrive written down rather than spoken over a tailgate. Where something cannot be known until the work starts, a wire embedded in a trunk, a hollow that turns out to run further than expected, the normal practice is to say so at quote stage rather than discover it on the day.
The things a good quote spells out
- Which trees, identified clearly enough that there is no argument about it afterward
- Whether the price is for removal, reduction, or deadwood, since those are different jobs
- Whether the stump is included, and to what depth
- Where the wood goes: hauled, left in rounds, or chipped and the chips left on site
- What happens to the brush, given that city collection excludes contractor-cut material
- How the crew reaches the tree, and what happens to the lawn if a machine crosses it
- Whether a crane is in the plan, since crane time changes the number substantially
- What is left behind: raked, blown, or as-is
Ready to put a number on the tree in your yard?
Call (336) 729-8100, or send the quote form and somebody will call you. Free either way.