Tree work in the Gatineau sector

The Gatineau sector, from Touraine to Le Baron by way of Limbour and Le Manoir, is the heart of the residential tree market in this region. These are bungalows and two-storey houses built from the 1970s to the 2000s on medium-sized lots, with trees planted at construction that are now 30 to 50 years old and have reached a size nobody planned for.

The recurring problem here is distance. A maple planted three metres from the house in 1985 now has a crown with a ten metre radius, branches on the roof and roots under the asphalt driveway. The typical requests in this sector are therefore: clear the roof, reduce a limb over the pool, and take out a stump before redoing the yard.

Ash trees define this sector more than any other. The 1970s and 1980s developments were planted heavily with ash, and the borer has killed a large share of them. A dead or dying ash beside a house is a bucket-truck dismantling job rather than a climbing job, because dead ash wood breaks without warning. If you have a tree with flaking bark and D-shaped exit holes, that is almost certainly what you are looking at.

The good side of the Gatineau sector is access. Driveways are wide, back yards open at the rear or the side, and a bucket truck or a grinder gets in without taking down a fence. That makes the work faster and therefore cheaper than exactly the same tree in Old Hull, and it is the sector where doing removal and stump grinding on the same day saves the most.