Tree Felling in Durbanville, Cape Town

What tree work in Durbanville actually involves

The trees we deal with most in Durbanville

Durbanville was farmland long before it was suburb, and the trees still give that away. The older streets around the village carry bluegums, English oaks, plane trees and tall pines that went in as farm plantings and windbreak rows rather than garden trees, so they are now considerably bigger than the erven they stand on. The wine farms on the edge of the suburb keep their oak avenues, and you see the same species repeated down the older residential roads. The newer estates on the Tygerberg slopes have the opposite problem — fast screening trees planted along a boundary wall a few years ago, already into next door's roof. Species matters more here than in most of Cape Town, because Durbanville sits on the City's confirmed shot hole borer list. English oak is in the small top group that usually dies within a few years of attack, and London plane breeds the beetle too. If you have either, walk the trunk before you decide anything.

Getting to the tree: access on Durbanville properties

Two quite different jobs share this postcode. The old erven around the village are generous — deep back gardens, room to drop timber in decent lengths — but nearly all of them have a single narrow side passage between the house and the boundary wall. The tree is the easy part; carrying every log and every bag of brush out through a gap you can touch both sides of is what actually fills the day, and it is the main thing we are measuring when we walk the property. The newer estates run on a different set of rules altogether. Boom gates, a contractor sign-in book, security wanting the vehicle registration in advance, streets narrow enough that a bakkie and trailer block them, and no verge to stack brush on while we work. Plenty of them also want the body corporate or the HOA to approve a removal before it happens, so it is worth asking your trustees first. Give us the estate name and the gate width when you call and we will bring the right setup.

Wind, weather and what it does to Durbanville trees

Durbanville sits inland at roughly 100 to 240 metres in the rolling Tygerberg and Koeberg hills, and that changes what the weather does to a tree. There is no salt in the air, so you do not get the burnt, one-sided canopies of the coast. What you get instead is a long, hot, dry summer that pulls the shale-derived clay soils tight and hard, and stresses anything with a shallow root plate — a tree that looked fine in September can be shedding limbs by February. Then winter rain turns the same clay to porridge. A big gum standing in saturated ground when a front comes through has far less holding it up than the trunk suggests, and that is when they lean, tear a root plate or go over whole. Late summer is the honest time to look at a tree here, because that is when a struggling one shows it.

Permissions and protected trees around Durbanville

Two things catch Durbanville owners out. The first is the verge. Those street trees belong to the City of Cape Town rather than to the house they stand outside, and pruning or felling one needs written permission from the City's Recreation and Parks department first — even where it is growing at your gate and dropping on your car. The second is species. Section 12 of the National Forests Act 84 of 1998 protects a national list of trees, and a few of them get planted in gardens deliberately, real yellowwood and cheesewood among them. Planted or self-sown, they still need a licence before a saw touches them. On top of that, because Durbanville is on the City's confirmed shot hole borer list, infested wood has to be chipped or destroyed on the property rather than carted off to a green-waste site. We flag all three at the quote stage.