When a Leyland cypress privacy screen dies, it usually doesn’t die one tree at a time – it goes in patches or the whole row. The good news for grinding: a row of Leylands is a line of stumps close together, and because the trip is the fixed cost, taking the whole row out in one visit costs far less per stump than calling us back for one here and one there.
Why whole rows go at once
Leylands are everywhere in the Triad because they grow fast and make a solid screen. The trouble is they’re fragile once stressed. Bagworms strip them, root rot sets in on wet clay, and a hot dry summer finishes off what’s already weak. Because they’re planted close and share the same soil and problems, when one goes the neighbors are often right behind it. That’s why you see those sad brown gaps along fence lines all over Clemmons and Lewisville.
The pricing math on a row
We price by stump diameter with a $200 minimum per visit, and that minimum is really about the trip – loading the grinder, driving out, the 811 locate, setup. Once we’re on-site and set up, each additional stump in the row is just more grinding, not another trip. So ten Leyland stumps in a line come out to a much lower per-stump cost than one stump on its own.
Two things work in your favor on Leylands specifically:
- They’re softwood, so they grind fast – quicker than an oak of the same width.
- They’re usually a modest diameter, not a two-foot hardwood trunk.
Put those together and a dead hedge that looks like a big job is often one of the more affordable things we grind. The full breakdown is on our stump grinding cost page.
One honest note: if the trees are still standing and dead, those come down first – that’s a tree crew’s job, not ours. We handle the stumps once they’re cut to the ground. If the row’s already down, even better.
Got a brown row you want gone before you replant? Text a photo down the line so we can count the stumps and gauge the sizes. We’ll usually send a price back the same day for the whole row at once.