I've just had a quote to remove a Robinia which has grown to about 25 to 30 feet. We need to have it removed as it is too close to the house. We've had one quote so far which is £350 to cut it down and then £200 on top of that to remove the stump. I was shocked as we normally do all the gardening jobs ourselves but the tree is just to high. We live in Glos. Do you think this is a fair price?

I'm not sure. Stump removal can be expensive.

We have just had a row of very large leylandii topped off, double row too, about 70 yards long, topped from approx. 18 feet to approx. 12 ft... took 3 hours and we were charged £200 including removal of waste, plus they moved any thing they needed to in the garden.

They worked very hard and drank PINTS of water!!! :D

Lindsay
x

My Gardener in Residence (#3 son, Nik) has just seen this and said, it sounds a fair price - it's about £50 less in total than he would charge - but we're in Essex.

I can always hire him out to Champdoggers - he is housetrained :D :D :D

Margot

Thanks for the replies. I'll let you what the other quotes are when I get them. It still sounds like a rip-off to me.

Well I received another quote this morning which I think is quite reasonable. Its for £295 and thats for felling the tree and the stump grind so I think we will probably go with that.

Regards
ange

are they removing all the wood aswell?

Yep, the quote says remove resulting debris and leaving tidy. So that is so much cheaper than the last quote!

Have you seen any of their work?????
Cheapest is not always best. Neither is most expensive either!!!
We have been called in to sort out many c*ck ups that people have gone for the cheap job, and the guys have ,massacred the thing they were meant to gently prune etc.
With anything like that i would always ask around to find someone who is careful,And highl;y recommnended as it wouldnt take much to fell the tree and it go straight on your house. And if you got someone who is not insured, and bearing in mind insurance gets extortinate if you are working above about 6' and if you use chainsaws etc well over 1k per year, I dont know if the house insurance would cover it if they felled it in the wrong direction.
Just a few things to think about.
Lea (who is a landscape gardener and has seen and heard of alot of cock ups from people going for the cheapest quote without knowing what they are taking on)

Hi,

Totally agree with Lea's post, my partner has a chainsaw qualification, insurance is extremely high which does reflect the costs however you do need someone whose experience and knows what they are doing.

Briony

My OH is in forestry and he has said please please make sure that whoever is removing the tree has got full public liability insurance,
under no circumstances is it recommended to use anyone that hasnt,If any part of the tree falls and causes damage to your house or any other buildings, your house insurance would not cover you and it wouldnt cover for any injury to any member of the general public either ( if they happened to be about )

thanks Jane thought that would be the case glad i was right lol!!!!!
Most people doing work like that should have a standard £1million public liability insurance. I know we do and we dont fell trees, unless they small ones.
Lea :)

My husband is a tree surgeon in Hampshire and he would charge £650 cos it's so close to the house you have to climb it and its very spikey and poisonous, the chipper costs £80 per day to hire and the stump grinder is £185 per day. So I think you've got a good deal :-)

Thanks for all your replies the tree surgeon is insured and he does work for the council so I guess they probably wouldn't use him if he was rubbish.

Well the tree has gone and now I can see sky. The tree surgeons did a brilliant job, you wouldn't even know that they'd been.

I had a "twig" that lay dormant in the garden for years, suddenly the apparently "dead" bit of wood started to grow, sprout leaves and looked quite nice, however I was concerned about its rapid growth and as I know as much about gardening as I do about astro physics asked the gardener to tell me what it was, he said it was an Ash.

As I know that these are what I call "park" trees and that they can grow to an incredible height, he is removing it next week, for next to nothing as he can transfer it to another garden; sometimes it is worth looking at your plants before they get toooo big...........

Yes Tohme I totally agree, my OH will be going up the ladder to trim the top growths of a couple more trees before they get out of hand. We don't want to be faced with another big  bill which we could have avoided.

Two golden rules when planting trees - don't plant them too near your house (roots can damage foundations) and don't plant them too close to a boundary fence (half the canopy will be over your neighbour's garden).