Lenexa Tree Removal has been taking trees down in Edwardsville for more than twenty years, and we quote a tree removal in Edwardsville against what the tree is actually doing — the lean, the defects, what sits underneath it — rather than by the hour. The estimate is written, it names the tree, the method and exactly which cleanup is included, and proof of our tree-work coverage reaches your hands before a saw comes off the truck.

A large share of the removals we are called out for here are ash, and those calls tend to arrive in the same order. A thin crown one summer, bark flaking off the trunk in plates the next, then a phone call about a tree that was already dead before anybody looked up at it. When a tree is on a house, a car, a drive or a power service, we come the same day.

Dead ash is a different job from live ash, and the difference lands in the method and the price rather than in a sales pitch. What follows is why this particular county has seen so much of it, and what a dead trunk does to the order the work has to happen in.

Twenty twelve, and it happened in this county

Kansas’s first confirmed emerald ash borer detection was in 2012, in Wyandotte County. Edwardsville is a Wyandotte County city, so this is not an insect that reached here late after the rest of the state had years of warning — the state’s opening chapter on it was written on this ground. The practical consequence for a homeowner is timing: ash decline here is not a forecast to plan around, it is a backlog to work through.

That shows up in what we get asked to look at. Much of the ash still standing on these lots is holding a crown that has been thinning for several seasons, and the owner’s question is usually whether the tree can be saved rather than whether it is infested. We answer that honestly and price both ways when there is a real choice, which on an ash with a spent crown there generally is not.

Ash also fails on a schedule that does not match a household’s. The tree stands, holds its bark and looks like next year’s problem right up until a wind event settles the question, and the removals we end up doing in a hurry are harder to staff and harder to stage than the same removal booked in the fall. Taking the dead one down ahead of storm season rather than after it is the cheapest decision available on this species.

What the printed recommendation still says

The species list this metro plants from is the K-State Research and Extension Master Gardeners brochure “Recommended Landscape Trees for Metropolitan Kansas City” (Rev.01-09). Under White Ash it still tells the reader that emerald ash borer “has been found in many states but not yet in Kansas or Missouri.” It was printed before the county’s own detection, and it is a fair measure of how long a recommendation on paper outlives the pest map it was written against.

We raise it because homeowners here read that kind of list and reasonably conclude the insect is somebody else’s problem. It is not, and it has not been since 2012. The status line went stale; the tree in the yard did not wait for a revision.

Looking for tree-removal closer to Overland Park? See Overland Park Tree-Removal.

Green ash was refused before the insect ever got here

The same brochure that misstates the status gets the recommendation right. Green Ash sits in its not-recommended column specifically on account of emerald ash borer, and White Ash sits under plant with caution for insects. A metro planting guide had written ash off before Kansas confirmed a single beetle, which is worth knowing when you are deciding what goes back in the hole.

Its other refusals are the ones we meet on the saw. Silver Maple is refused for weak wood and Pin Oak for soil issues, and the blunt line on the Callery pear cultivar reads “DO NOT plant Bradford cultivar; severe splitting occurs on 10-15 year old trees.” The general warning is the one that explains a good share of our storm calls: “Many fast growing varieties are brittle with narrow crotch angles that can lead to severe breakage during storms.” Narrow crotch angles are codominant stems with included bark at the union, and that union is what lets go.

That is also why we price a save and a removal side by side whenever a live tree is in the balance. Cabling and bracing a codominant union on an otherwise sound tree buys real years, while the same hardware in an ash with a failing crown buys nothing but an invoice. We say which one you have and let the two numbers sit next to each other.

Ash was planted here, not inherited

The EPA’s potential natural vegetation for this ecoregion, 40b Osage Cuestas, is upland forest dominated by shagbark hickory, bitternut hickory, red oak, white oak and black oak, with Ohio buckeye, American bladdernut and pawpaw as common understory trees. Ash is not what this ground grew on its own — most of it went in as a yard and street tree, in rows, planted within a few years of its neighbors. That is a large part of why it is coming out the same way, and why hackberry, which the brochure does recommend, is a sane answer for the hole afterward.

What a standing dead ash does to a removal plan

A dead ash does not stay a climbable tree for long. The wood dries, turns brittle and stops giving the warning a live stem gives, so the limb that would have bent instead takes the load and simply parts. ANSI Z133 governs how we work around that, and the honest version is that the assessment ends with the climber on the ground more often than not.

So the method changes, and the cost changes with it. Where we would have set a climber into a live tree, a dead one gets an aerial lift or a crane, pieces come off on a rigging block through a friction device rather than being dropped, and the trunk is bucked with the three-cut method wherever a section is under tension. A spider lift reaches back yards a bucket truck cannot, and a grapple saw handles wood we would rather nobody stood under.

None of that is equipment for its own sake. A live tree gives a crew options — crown cleaning, a reduction cut, a spar to work off — while a spent ash hands back a trunk that has to be dismantled from the outside in. The quote reflects the method the tree forces on us, which is why two ash of the same size on the same street can price differently a year apart.

The order matters when there is more than one

When a property carries several ash, the sequence is the whole conversation. We rank them on what they are doing now — crown condition, diameter at breast height, what sits in the drop zone — and record it on the ISA Basic Tree Risk Assessment Form, so the one over the driveway or the roofline comes down first even when it looks better than the one out at the fence.

Waiting is not free on an ash the way it can be on a healthy oak. The Kansas City/Pleasant Hill forecast office recorded 89 mph winds in this metro on July 14, 2023, with widespread outages and roughly 60,000 customers still without power the following day. A brittle dead trunk is not what anyone wants standing over a roof going into weather like that.

Where the service drop changes who does what

Evergy’s published position is that vegetation affecting the line running from the pole to your meter is the customer’s responsibility, which makes a dead ash over that drop a crew’s job rather than a utility call. On an assist to the lines it does own, Evergy removes limbs within ten feet of energized conductors and leaves any debris at the worksite. Either way the cleanup and the remainder of the tree come back to us, and the debris leaves with us instead of sitting in the yard.

What is not restricted here, and why we say so plainly

Edwardsville publishes no permit requirement for taking down a tree on private property. The city’s tree rules live in Article 15.04, Trees and Shrubs, inside Chapter 15, Public Ways and Property, and that article runs eight sections with no application, no review board, no caliper table and no fee anywhere in it. Nobody is filing paperwork to remove their own ash in this city.

There is no tree-work license to check either. Kansas issues no arborist or tree-work license at all — a claim to the contrary circulates widely online and is simply false — and the state’s only related credential is a nursery one. The Kansas Forest Service points homeowners toward ISA certification or the Kansas Arborists Association, and both of those are voluntary credentials rather than licenses.

Edwardsville does buy its contractor licensing from Johnson County, under Ordinance 1040, effective July 1, 2021. The trigger there is a building permit under Chapter 3, Building Regulations, and none of the county’s licensing classes reaches tree work — every one of them describes construction, alteration, repair or demolition of structures. City-level licensing from the Unified Government does not reach this city at all, because Edwardsville is carved out of the consolidated city’s city functions by statute, and the Unified Government publishes no tree trimmer or arborist license in any event.

So the question worth putting to any crew working here is coverage, not credentials. Ours is documented and handed over before the work starts, and the removal is quoted against the tree rather than against the clock.

Before the cutting wheel turns

Every stump grind starts with a Kansas 811 locate, without exception. The ground along the Kaw Drive corridor at the south edge of town is river-valley alluvium — deep overbank and terrace soils carrying no bedrock restriction in the profile for a cutting wheel to find — which is a friendlier answer than the shallow benches on the cuestas east and south of here.

We still will not promise a grinding depth before we have seen the stump. Roots, buried fill and old service lines all live under a lawn, and the number that matters is the one we settle on standing over the grinder with the locate marks in front of us.