Tree Service in Bowmanville, Ontario

Local, in the literal sense

Big Green Tree Care is a Bowmanville business. The truck, the chipper and the Merlo grapplesaw telehandler all live here, so a call from Liberty Street or Scugog Street usually gets looked at faster than a call from anywhere else in our range. If you need a quote, we can often swing by the same week rather than booking you out a month.

We cover all of Clarington from here: Bowmanville, Courtice, Newcastle, Orono, Newtonville, Enniskillen, Hampton, Solina and the concession roads in between. Being close also matters when weather comes through. When a line of storms crosses Lake Ontario and drops limbs across town, we are already in town.

The trees we deal with here

Bowmanville splits into two very different tree problems. Older streets around the downtown core, Church, Wellington, Queen, have mature Norway and silver maples planted decades ago. Those trees are big, they are close to houses, and a lot of them are carrying codominant stems that were never pruned out when they were young. That is the classic call: a maple that has split at the union and is now leaning over a garage.

The newer subdivisions north of Highway 2 and out toward Longworth are the other half. Those lots were planted twenty to thirty years ago with ash, honey locust, linden and a lot of fast growers on small lots. Emerald ash borer has gone through those ash trees hard. A dead standing ash gets brittle fast and is one of the more dangerous trees to climb, so if you have one we would rather see it come out now than in three winters.

Out along the ravine and Soper Creek you get willow, poplar and Manitoba maple, all soft wooded and all prone to shedding limbs in wind. On the agricultural edges toward Orono and Newtonville it is more spruce windrows, cedar hedges and old fencerow trees that need clearing back off laneways and equipment routes.

Local conditions worth knowing

We sit close enough to Lake Ontario that the wind off the water is a real factor. South facing properties toward the lakeshore and Port Darlington take consistent gusts, and trees that grew up sheltered by a neighbour's tree tend to fail the year after that neighbour's tree comes down. If a big removal has happened next door, it is worth having yours looked at.

Freeze thaw cycles here are also brutal on the heavy wet snow loads that pile onto cedars and spruce. Every February we get calls about hedges splayed open at the top. Most of that is fixable with proper reduction pruning and, in a few cases, cabling, rather than tearing the hedge out.

Older in-town lots come with narrow side yards, back-lane access and mature gardens, which is exactly what the Merlo is for. It fits down side yards a bucket truck cannot enter, so we can pick a tree apart without wheeling equipment across your lawn or dropping fence panels.

What we do in town

Tree removal, trimming and pruning, stump grinding and chipping, storm and emergency response, lot clearing, road and driveway clearance, hedge work, forestry mulching and tree preservation. Most Bowmanville jobs are a single day. Quotes are free and done in person, and we tell you when a tree does not need to come out, because plenty of them do not. What those pruning cuts are for is in the Durham pruning guide.

We are fully insured, and we will hand over proof of insurance before we start. Read more about how removals are handled on our tree removal page, or see what we do one town west in Oshawa.

Permits in Clarington

Bowmanville does not have its own tree permit. The town sits inside the Municipality of Clarington, and Clarington regulates tree destruction under its own by-law. On a normal residential lot, a tree well inside the property line is usually not the case that needs permission. A woodland, a street tree, a boundary tree, or a tree in a valley can be. We are not the municipality. The practical version, with the links to who decides, is the Durham permit guide. The municipality-wide page, which is not a copy of this one, is tree service in Clarington.

Travel beyond Bowmanville

Bowmanville is the base but not the boundary. We work west through Courtice, Oshawa and Whitby, north to Port Perry, Scugog Island, Millbrook and Cavan Monaghan, and east through Port Hope, Cobourg, Grafton and Roseneath. If the job is right, we will travel past all of that. Not sure whether you are in range? Call or text (289) 675-8777 and we will tell you straight.