Tree Service in Cedarhurst, NY

The village is named for a grove of cedars that stood near the old post office - it was Ocean Point until 1884. A hundred and forty years later the trees are the reason people call us, usually because one of them has grown considerably larger than the lot it is standing on.

Cedarhurst has its own rules - and so does the next block over

Cedarhurst was incorporated in 1910, which means it is a village with its own code, not just a piece of the Town of Hempstead. Its code includes a chapter covering gardeners, landscapers, and tree servicers, with an annual license year - so whether the crew on your property is licensed in the village is a real question, not a technicality.

The Five Towns make this genuinely confusing, because the jurisdictions interleave:

• Cedarhurst - incorporated village, own code, own licensing chapter.
• Lawrence - also an incorporated village, also its own rules.
• Woodmere and Inwood - unincorporated, so Town of Hempstead Chapter 184 applies, which regulates the curbside strip and not your back yard.
• Hewlett Harbor, Hewlett Bay Park, Hewlett Neck - separate villages again, and Hewlett Harbor regulates trees down to 22 inches of circumference, dead ones included. See the Hewlett page.

Nobody expects a homeowner to track that. We ask for the address first and confirm the permit path with the Village before we schedule - Village Hall is at 516-295-5770 if you want to check anything yourself.

A very small village with very large trees

Cedarhurst is dense: about 0.68 square miles and roughly 7,400 people, which works out to around 10,900 per square mile. The railroad arrived in 1869, the village incorporated in 1910, and the bulk of the housing went up through the mid-twentieth century. Nothing about that geometry has changed since - but the trees have had sixty to a hundred years to grow.

So a removal here is rarely a matter of felling something. It is a climber taking the tree apart in sections over a driveway and a neighbor's roof, or a crane set up in the street lifting pieces out - which means coordinating access, and sometimes a brief road closure, on streets that were not designed around a crane outrigger. That planning is most of the job, and it is what separates a clean removal from a repaired fence.

Salt water, saturated ground, and root-plate failure

Cedarhurst sits low - around 26 feet - and the Five Towns have chronic street and tidal flooding, with the bowl-like effect local reporting describes when water rises faster here than in surrounding areas. Sandy in 2012 uprooted trees across the county and left roughly nine in ten LIPA customers without power.

The tree consequence is specific: saturated soil holds a root plate far less firmly, so a wind event that a tree would shrug off in dry ground can lift the whole root mass instead. That is why so many "healthy" trees come down in storms here. If the soil at the base of a big tree is cracked or mounded on one side, that is a warning sign worth acting on - the full checklist is in signs a tree is dying or dangerous.

What we do in Cedarhurst

• Tree removal - rigging or crane on tight village lots, with the permit path confirmed first.
• Emergency and storm work - trees on houses and wires first. Wires down: PSEG at 1-800-490-0075.
• Trimming and pruning - weight reduction over roofs, and clearance work before sukkah season.
• Stump grinding - narrow-gate machines for back yards; what it costs.

Cedarhurst, Lawrence, Woodmere, Inwood, and the rest of the Five Towns - about four miles from us. Written, itemized estimates: (516) 555-0100.