Blog | Tree Removal
There is a particular kind of gray, bare-limbed tree standing in yards all over Arlington right now, along the alleys in Lyon Park, in the back corners of Cherrydale lots, at the edges of the county’s parks. Most of them are ash, and most of them have been dead for a while. The homeowner has usually been putting off a decision for a season or two, partly because the tree isn’t in the way and partly because nobody wants to pay to take down something that has stopped being a problem.
That instinct is understandable. It is also, with ash specifically, the wrong read on the situation. A dead ash behaves differently from a dead oak or maple, and the difference is the entire reason arborists in this region treat every dead tree of this kind as its own category.
This is not a coincidence or a bad drought year. It is emerald ash borer, a metallic-green beetle introduced from Asia that lays its eggs in the bark crevices of ash trees. The larvae bore in and feed in the thin layer of conductive tissue just under the bark, carving long S-shaped tunnels that sever the tree’s plumbing between roots and canopy.
Arlington County’s own account of it is direct: the county’s urban forest is under threat from the borer, native ash have no defense against it, and after a 2008 rediscovery in Arlington and Fairfax the county considers the infestation to be county-wide. Infected trees keep turning up in Arlington’s parks and on county property. The first Virginia detection was in Fairfax County back in 2003.
So if your ash died and your neighbor’s ash died the year before, nothing you did or failed to do caused it. Every untreated ash in the county is on the same trajectory.
Any dead tree near a house, a driveway, a fence line, or a place people walk is a liability. Ash raises the stakes because of what the borer does to the wood on its way through.
Because ash moves water through a thin ring of conducting tissue and the larvae destroy exactly that ring, an infested tree dries out fast. The structural wood doesn’t slowly soften the way it does in a decaying oak; it goes brittle and starts cracking internally, and the bark hides those cracks from anyone looking up from the lawn. Purdue’s extension foresters describe limbs snapping thirty feet up on a calm day as an unremarkable occurrence with dead ash, and their guidance to landowners is to plan removal rather than delay it, because waiting only makes the tree more brittle and the job more dangerous.
Practically, that means the failure mode is unpredictable. A dying maple usually gives you warning: a lean, a visible cavity, a shedding limb. A dead ash can hold a full crown of intact-looking branches and then drop one of them, whole, with no wind event to explain it. That is the case for treating it as a hazard tree rather than routine yard work, even when it looks perfectly stable from your kitchen window.
Ash tree decline runs top-down, which is why it is easy to miss from ground level until the tree is well advanced. What our crews look for:
If you’re not certain the tree is even an ash (opposite branching, compound leaves, and diamond-patterned bark on mature trunks are the field marks), that is worth settling first. A professional look at the tree’s condition answers both the species question and the more useful one: how far gone is it, and what is it likely to do next.
Sometimes, and the threshold is fairly well established. Systemic insecticide treatments can protect an ash, but they work as protection, not rescue: the tree needs enough functioning canopy left to move the product through itself. Purdue’s guidance puts the practical cutoff at roughly thirty percent canopy loss: past that, too much of the tree is already dead for treatment to be worth doing. The difficulty is that most homeowners don’t notice the problem until they’re already at or beyond that point.
Treatment is also a standing commitment rather than a one-time fix, because it has to be repeated on a schedule for as long as you want the tree. Arlington County takes exactly this approach with its own inventory, treating its most valuable trees rather than every ash it owns, and points residents to a decision guide for making the same call on their own property.
The honest framing for most Arlington yards: if the tree still has a full, healthy crown and it is a specimen you’d genuinely miss, treatment is a real option worth pricing out with an arborist. If the top of the tree is already thin, the decision on that tree has effectively been made for you.
Trimming matters even for the ash trees you’re not removing yet. Regular trimming reduces the load a weakened crown has to carry, and it’s often the first step our Arlington, VA arborists recommend before deciding a tree removal is unavoidable. If trimming brings the canopy back into balance, great; if the trimming reveals more decline than expected, that visit turns straight into a tree removal conversation instead of a second appointment. These trimming services can be bundled with our other tree services during the same site visit, and if you’re weighing multiple ash trees, ask about combining assessment services with tree removal services into one appointment to save a return trip.
The most common thing we hear is some version of “it’s not bothering anybody, we’ll deal with it next year.” With ash, next year is a worse job than this year, for three reasons.
The wood keeps getting more brittle, which narrows the options for how a crew can take it apart. A climber can work a sound dead tree; nobody should be climbing a dead ash that has been standing for two or three seasons, because the anchor points can’t be trusted. That pushes the work toward a bucket truck or crane, dismantled from outside the tree, and that in turn means access matters. On Arlington’s older, tighter lots, with detached garages, alley approaches, and mature neighbors’ trees to work around, equipment access is frequently the constraint that decides how a job runs.
Meanwhile the tree is shedding pieces the whole time, and a shedding tree rarely warns you before the next piece comes down. A limb that comes down on its own picks its own landing spot, and that is when a planned tree removal turns into an unplanned one: often on a weekend, often onto something that costs more than the removal would have.
Two follow-on questions come up almost every time.
Firewood first: don’t move it. Transporting infested ash firewood is one of the main ways the borer travels to new areas, and Arlington County’s guidance is to avoid moving firewood into your community and to ask suppliers where theirs came from. Ash split and burned on the same property is a different matter; the concern is the wood leaving the site.
Stumps second: ash will send up sprouts from a cut stump, and those sprouts are ash too, meaning they’re on the same borer trajectory as their parent. If you don’t want to be pulling shoots out of that spot for the next several years, grinding the stump out when the tree comes down is the cleaner ending.
G&V Tree Service is a Northern Virginia tree service that has spent decades removing hazardous, storm-damaged, and EAB-killed ash trees for homeowners across Arlington, VA. When a dead ash turns into a public safety issue for your family or the neighbors next door, our certified arborists treat the removal service as a priority, not a someday project.
Every week we get calls from Arlington, VA homeowners asking the same question: is this dangerous ash tree going to come down on its own, or does it need a professional removal service now? The honest answer is almost always the second one. A single ash tree with real EAB damage doesn’t heal, and every season you wait adds risk instead of removing it.
Whether you have one dead ash tree in the backyard or several dead trees scattered across a wooded lot, our tree removal crews handle Arlington, VA properties of every size. We also look at the trees around the ash while we’re there: crowded branches on the maples and oaks that got shaded out during the ash’s decline often need trimming once the canopy opens back up, and our arborists are glad to flag that during the same visit.
Beyond ash removal, our Arlington tree service covers emergency tree response, storm cleanup, and routine trimming for the trees you’re keeping. If a limb comes down on a weekend, our emergency crew doesn’t wait for Monday to call you back.
There’s no cost to find out where you stand. Call G&V Tree Service, and we’ll send a certified arborist out to assess the tree and give you a straightforward quote for the removal, no pressure and no guesswork. We serve Arlington, VA, and the rest of Northern Virginia, and every job comes with the same certified-arborist oversight from the first call to final cleanup. If you’re not sure where your ash stands, give us a call before the next storm moves through.
We built G&V’s list of tree services around what Northern Virginia properties actually need once an ash starts dying: tree removal services for the dead tree itself, tree trimming services for what’s left standing nearby, stump grinding services once the trunk is down, and emergency tree removal services for anything that falls before we get there. Ask about any of these services when you call, and we’ll fold multiple services into a single visit instead of scheduling a separate tree removal for each one.
There’s no reliable number, and anyone who quotes you one is guessing. It depends on the tree’s size, how much root decay has set in, and what weather it catches. What is predictable is the direction: it gets more brittle and less predictable every season it stands, and it starts dropping limbs long before the trunk goes.
Possibly, but look at the top of the tree, not the bottom. Full lower branches with a thin or bare upper crown is the classic late-stage picture, and it means the tree is further along than it appears from the ground.
We’d strongly advise against it. Brittle, unpredictable wood is the single worst material to learn felling on, and the internal cracks that make it dangerous are invisible until the tree is already moving. This is the removal category where DIY attempts go wrong most often.
Treat that as the tree telling you what comes next. Keep people and vehicles out from under the canopy, and get it looked at promptly; if something is hung up in the crown or leaning over a structure, that’s an emergency response rather than a scheduled visit.
Only to other ash. Emerald ash borer is a specialist and doesn’t attack oaks, maples, poplars, or the rest of your yard. If ash is the only ash you own, removing it ends the issue on your property.
Worth doing, and worth choosing a species deliberately. Diversity is the actual lesson of the last twenty years; neighborhoods that leaned heavily on one species lost a lot of canopy at once.
Yes. If a dead ash is hung up, leaning over a structure, or has already dropped a limb, that’s an emergency tree call, not a scheduled one, and our emergency crew responds accordingly. For anything short of that, we’ll set up a standard removal service visit at a time that works for you.
It depends on the tree’s size, how many dead ash trees are on the property, and how much access our crew and equipment have to work with. We don’t quote a removal service over the phone; every job starts with a free on-site visit so the quote reflects the actual tree, not a guess.
We work throughout Arlington and can tell you in one visit whether you’re looking at an ash, how far the decline has gone, and whether you’re deciding between treatment and removal or just scheduling the removal. If you’d like a look, our Arlington tree service team can come out and walk the property with you.
If you’ve got a dead ash tree, a dying ash tree, or you’re just not sure what you’re looking at, G&V Tree Service is ready to help. We handle tree removal, tree trimming, stump grinding, and emergency tree work across Arlington, VA and the wider Northern Virginia area. Call us, tell us what’s going on with your tree, and we’ll send an Arlington, VA crew out to take a look. No obligation, no pressure, just an honest read on your tree and a straightforward quote for the removal.
G & V Tree Service Inc
6434 Brandon Ave Suite 204
Springfield, VA 22150
Phone: (703) 569-2570
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