Tree Felling in Kommetjie, Cape Town

What tree work in Kommetjie actually involves

The trees we deal with most in Kommetjie

Milkwoods are the signature tree of this village, and they behave unlike anything inland. Groves of white milkwood grow along this coast in dense, low thickets, and in a garden that same habit shows up as a wide, spreading crown with heavy sideways limbs that end up over a roof, a boundary wall or somebody's car. They're slow growers. A hard cut on a milkwood takes decades to come back, so the job here is nearly always careful reduction rather than removal. Behind them you've got rooikrans thicket pushing in from the dune side, self-seeded pines, and the wind-bent conifers people planted as screens. Almost everything in Kommetjie is shaped by wind — flattened on the seaward face, all the growth pushed inland — which means the weight is sitting on one side of the trunk before we even start.

Getting to the tree: access on Kommetjie properties

Kommetjie plots are small and the roads are narrow, and that changes how a job runs. There's usually no rear access and often no room for a truck on the property at all, so we work off the street and keep it to one lane rather than blocking a road people need to get out on. Chipping happens where there's space for it and gets shuttled out where there isn't. The verges are sand, so a loaded vehicle parked on one will bury itself — we stay on the hard surface and carry material. Low boundary walls and wooden decks leave very little clear ground to drop anything into, and milkwood limbs are far denser and heavier than they look, so most pieces come down on ropes under control rather than being dropped and dealt with afterwards.

Wind, weather and what it does to Kommetjie trees

The wind here is nothing like the sheltered False Bay side of the peninsula. Kommetjie faces the Atlantic, so the summer wind arrives cross-onshore off the sea from the south-west and the winter fronts come in from the north-west. Either way it's onshore, salt-laden and near-constant, and that's what produces the wind-pruned, flat-topped shapes all over the village. Salt burns off new growth on the seaward face, the tree answers by putting everything into the sheltered side, and over years the load quietly moves off-centre. Fire is the other seasonal worry. Wildfires have run the slopes above the village before, and a garden hard up against fynbos and old rooikrans thicket is a garden with fuel against its fence line. Thinning that back and getting the dead material out before the dry months is worth considerably more than tidying up afterwards.

Permissions and protected trees around Kommetjie

This is the one that matters most in Kommetjie. The white milkwood, Sideroxylon inerme, is protected nationally under section 12 of the National Forests Act 84 of 1998 — tree number 579 on the list gazetted as Government Notice 4496 in Government Gazette 50291 on 13 March 2024. Owning the land doesn't change it. Cutting, disturbing or removing a protected milkwood without a licence from the department is an offence, and given how many are standing in gardens here, identifying the tree is the first thing we do. Rooikrans on the same property runs the opposite way: it's Category 1b, so the duty is to control it. Pavement and road-reserve trees belong to the City of Cape Town — that's an application to the City, not a job for us.