Hedge & Shrub Removal in Asheville

Shrubs are the unglamorous half of tree work, and nobody in these mountains is more opinionated about them than we are — because half the "shrubs" on WNC properties aren't shrubs at all. They're a native rhododendron thicket older than your house, and we treat that differently than the honeysuckle choking it.

The Native-Protection Honesty: Laurel & Rhododendron

Let's be straight about the two plants people most often call us to "get rid of." Mountain laurel and rhododendron are native Appalachian evergreens — not landscaping mistakes. A mature rhododendron thicket on a north slope is doing real work: holding the hillside against erosion, sheltering winter birds, feeding pollinators in June when little else blooms, and shading the headwater creeks that keep the French Broad cold. An old mountain laurel with gnarled, twisted stems is a genuinely beautiful plant that no nursery can sell you at any age. So when you call about removing either one, our first questions are about why — because the honest answer is often not removal.

Here's what we actually recommend, depending on the situation:

• Overgrown against the house or blocking the view? That's usually a thinning and shaping job, not removal. Rhododendron tolerates hard renovation pruning — cut back hard in late winter and it rebounds dense and manageable, blooming again within a season or two. You keep the native screen, the slope keeps its roots, and your view comes back.
• Dead, diseased, or failing? Sometimes laurel and rhodo simply decline — root-rot in poorly drained spots, winter burn on exposed ridges, or old age. Then removal is right, and we take them out including the root crown so they don't return from fragments.
• In the way of a build, driveway, or utilities? Fair enough — projects are projects. We remove cleanly, and where the slope needs it, we suggest replacement screening in spots that won't conflict, because bare mountain clay erodes fast.
• Just want them gone, period? Your property, your call — we'll do the work well. But we'll say once, on the record: in most yards the "problem" is twenty years of no pruning, and a hard thinning would have solved it for a third of the price. If you'd rather replace them, we'll point you at our tree planting page and suggest natives that earn the spot.

What We Remove Without a Lecture

Not everything green deserves protection. The invasives that smother WNC understory get zero sentimentality from us: bush honeysuckle, privet, multiflora rose, burning bush, English ivy gone arboreal, and the occasional escaped ornamental pear. We cut, grub, and — where regrowth is certain — treat stumps or schedule follow-up, because cutting an invasive once is a haircut, not a removal. Overgrown landscape hedges (boxwood, holly, forsythia) past their renovation window also come out clean, roots and all, ready for replanting.

How Mountain Shrub Removal Actually Goes

Mountain-shrub work is hand work. Mature rhododendron and laurel grow on mountain slopes where equipment often can't go, so our crews cut, drag, and carry — material comes out to the chipper the same way it grew, one load at a time. Root crowns are grubbed with hand tools and minimal soil disturbance, because grubbing a big thicket with a machine on a steep bank trades one problem for three. Everything chips on site; chips stay with you as mulch for the remaining plantings or we haul them. On larger clearing projects we coordinate with our land clearing crew so the boundary between "clear this" and "protect that" is walked and flagged before anything is cut.

Shrub Removal Prices (2026)