Clearing an Overgrown Lot Without Losing the Good Trees

Somewhere behind the buckthorn there is a tree you remember. Maybe the oak your grandfather mowed around, or a black walnut still dropping nuts onto ground nobody has walked in years. You want the thicket gone, and you want that tree still standing when it is.

That is a different job from wiping a lot down to dirt, and it gets planned differently. Most of the planning happens before any equipment is unloaded, standing in the brush with a roll of flagging tape.

What gets cleared in selective clearing, and what stays?

Selective clearing removes the understory and the junk trees while the trees you chose stay standing with their root zones intact. On most brush clearing in Lorain County, what goes is buckthorn, honeysuckle, grapevine, deadfall, and the volunteer saplings that filled in every open gap. What stays is a short list of trees, picked on a walk-through and marked before work starts.

The equipment is the same as on any clearing job. What changes is that the plan bends around a few fixed points on the lot. Where the machine travels and where the brush piles get staged are both decided with the keepers in mind, before anything gets cut.

Which trees on an overgrown lot are worth keeping?

Keep the sound, long-lived hardwoods, the kind of tree you would plant on purpose if the lot were empty. On Lorain County ground that usually means a handful of trees that were there before the scrub moved in. Trees that came up with the scrub rarely earn a spot.

Usually worth keeping, if the trunk and crown look healthy:

• white, red, or bur oak
• sugar maple
• shagbark or other hickory
• black walnut
• a sycamore with a sound trunk, especially in the lower, wetter ground toward the Black River

Rarely worth the trouble of working around are boxelder, which splits and sprawls, cottonwood anywhere near the house, volunteer ash that sprouted after the old ash died, and anything with a hollow base or a trunk you can see daylight through.

Judgment still matters more than species. A fine oak crowded into a lean for twenty years may be worth less than a straight hickory beside it. A walnut sitting where the new driveway has to go is not a keeper, however good it looks.

How do the keepers get marked before a machine comes in?

Keepers get marked during a walk-through with the owner and the estimator together, usually with bright flagging tape tied around the trunk at eye height so an operator sees it from the cab. Anything unflagged is fair game, so the marking walk is where you speak up about the dogwood you like or the maple your kids planted. If you already know a tree matters to you, tie a strip on it yourself before the estimator arrives, even if you are not sure it qualifies.

Walk the whole lot, including the back corner you have not been into in years. Thickets hide things. A tree that looks like one more gray trunk from the lawn can turn out to be a sizable oak once you are standing next to it. It helps to go in late fall or early spring, when the buckthorn is still green and most of the trees you care about are bare, because the difference shows. Then again, a sugar maple is easier to pick out in leaf. Either season works if you walk it slowly.

The written estimate should list the kept trees, by species and rough spot on the lot. If the paper only says “clear lot,” there is nothing to point to when a flagged tree has a skinned trunk afterward. A line that says “retain two oaks and one walnut along the north side, work inside their drip lines by hand” is a line everyone on the crew can read.

Can clearing equipment damage the trees you keep?

Yes, and most of the damage happens below ground where nobody sees it for a year or two. A tree’s roots spread well past the trunk and mostly run close to the surface. A tracked machine driving over that ground, especially wet clay like much of what sits under Lorain County, compacts it and crushes the fine roots that do the feeding.

The fix is a buffer the machine never enters. Inside it, the brush gets cut by hand and dragged out to where the grapple can reach it. Slower work, and most of what a keeper needs from the crew.

Bark wounds are the other risk. A grapple arm or a swinging log can tear a strip of bark off a trunk in a second. The tree cannot grow that bark back. It seals the edges over time, and the wound stays a way in for decay for years. So the crew keeps the machine’s working end pointed away from keepers and drags material out instead of swinging it past. Brush piles go somewhere other than against a flagged trunk.

Timing helps too. Clearing on dry or frozen ground does less harm to the root zone than the same work in a wet April.

Why do trees that stood fine in the thicket sometimes fall after clearing?

A tree that grew up inside a thicket was built for shelter. It usually runs tall and thin with a small crown only at the very top, because the brush around it blocked the wind and shaded its trunk. Take that cover away all at once and the tree faces full wind and full sun it never had to handle, which is when some go over or crack.

Foresters call the wind failure windthrow, and a lone tree left standing in a freshly opened lot is the classic setup for it. The sun side matters as well. Bark that sat in shade for decades can scorch on the south and west faces once it is exposed, and thin-barked trees like maple show it most.

The better approach is to keep keepers in groups where the lot allows. Three oaks left standing together still break the wind for each other, which a lone oak in the middle of a cleared lot cannot do. If one tree you care about is already leaning or forked, look at whether that tree is worth saving before it becomes the lone survivor in an open field.

What happens to grapevine already up in a keeper’s crown?

It gets cut at the base, often with a short section taken out so there is no doubt it is severed, and then left up in the crown to die and dry. Over the next season or two some of it rots loose and drops out in pieces. Some hangs on longer.

Pulling a live vine down is how a keeper loses limbs. Wild grape wraps around branches and hooks over forks all the way up, and yanking it from the ground tears whatever it is wrapped around. Brown vine hanging in a tree for a season looks rough, and it will. If a dead vine is still hanging over the driveway or a walkway next year, that one piece can come down with a pole saw once it has gone brittle.

Does keeping trees make a clearing job cost more?

Sometimes a little, sometimes not at all. Hand work inside the buffers and careful machine routing add time. Fewer trees to fell, buck, chip, and grind takes time back off. On lighter lots the two often come close to canceling out.

For a starting point, light brush and scrub clearing typically runs $1,500 to $3,000 per acre in this area, and the published range for what land clearing costs per acre runs $1,500 to $6,000 per acre, with ground full of established trees and stumps at the top. A lot that is mostly buckthorn and grapevine with four keepers sits toward the lighter end. One where the keepers are scattered through heavy timber, each needing its own hand-cleared ring, moves up.

A lot of the overgrown parcels in Elyria, North Ridgeville, Amherst, or out toward Grafton and LaGrange are well under an acre, and those get priced from a walk-through rather than by the acre on paper. Permits, the floodplain question along the Black River, and where the chips end up are covered in the questions on the land clearing page.

Facing this decision on a real tree? The service page has the process and what a visit involves: Land and lot clearing in Elyria.