Tree Service in Cedarhurst, NY

The village got its name from a grove of cedars that stood near the old post office. Before 1884 it was Ocean Point. A hundred and forty years on, the trees are still why people call us, usually because one of them has outgrown the lot it's standing on.

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

Cedarhurst incorporated in 1910, so it's a village with its own code, not just a corner of the Town of Hempstead. That code has a chapter covering gardeners, landscapers, and tree servicers, with an annual license year. Whether the crew in your driveway holds a current Village license is a fair question, and the answer should come quick.

The Five Towns make this 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, and that covers the curbside strip, 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 keep track of all that. We ask for the address first and confirm the permit path with the Village before we put you on the calendar. Village Hall is at 516-295-5770 if you'd rather check something 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 showed up in 1869, the village incorporated in 1910, and most of the housing went up through the mid-twentieth century. The lots haven't changed shape since. The trees have had sixty to a hundred years to get bigger.

So a removal here is almost never a matter of felling something. It's 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 over the ridge, on streets that were never laid out with a crane outrigger in mind. That means coordinating access, and sometimes a brief road closure. The planning is most of the job, and it's what keeps the neighbor's fence in one piece.

Salt water, saturated ground, and root-plate failure

Cedarhurst sits low, around 26 feet, and the Five Towns get chronic street and tidal flooding. Local reporting describes a bowl effect, water rising faster here than in the areas around it. Sandy in 2012 uprooted trees across the county and knocked out power to roughly nine in ten LIPA customers.

For a big tree, wet ground is the danger. Saturated soil holds a root plate far less firmly, so a wind the tree would shrug off in a dry August can lift the whole root mass out of the lawn instead. That's 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, don't wait on it. 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. Call and we'll put the whole thing in writing, each item priced on its own line, and if there's a date the work has to be finished by, say so up front and we'll plan around it: (516) 619-3667.