Tree Service in Shawnee County

Shawnee County is stricter about burning than the counties east of it. Under the county's open burning regulation, essentially all outdoor fires require a permit, with cooking fires in a barbeque grill or a similar non-combustible container as the practical exception. Permits cover dry clean trees, brush, yard and garden debris, wild grasses, and agricultural fields. Fire districts issue them, and some issue long-term permits in person at the station.

That single rule changes how brush disposal gets planned on this side of the county line. Where a Douglas County acreage owner checks a hotline and calls in, a Shawnee County owner needs a permit in hand before the pile exists. For most jobs we run the material through a chipper or a mulcher the day we cut it, which puts the organic matter back on the ground and removes the burn day from the schedule entirely.

North of the Kansas River, Shawnee County is glaciated drift plain built from till, outwash, and loess, and the towns there sit in the valley: Silver Lake on an abandoned river channel, Rossville on Cross Creek. South of the river the ground rises into the Osage Cuestas, limestone and shale ridges with valleys between them, which is where Auburn and Berryton are.

Trees behave differently on each side. Valley soil is deep, holds water, and grows silver maple and cottonwood fast, with failures happening at the root plate after saturation. Cuesta ridges can have limited soil depth over rock, so roots spread wide and shallow and the timber trends toward bur oak, Osage orange, and redcedar. About sixteen percent of the county sits in a special flood hazard area, which is a useful number to hold onto when deciding what to plant near a creek.

In July 1951 the Kansas River crested at Topeka more than fourteen feet above flood stage, and the valley towns of Rossville, Silver Lake, and Tecumseh went under along with North Topeka. Fifteen years later, on June 8, 1966, an F5 formed in the southwest corner of the county near Auburn and ran about twenty-two miles northeast through Topeka and the Washburn campus, killing seventeen and destroying more than eight hundred homes.

The replanting after 1966 is why so much of the county's urban canopy is a single age class dominated by fast-shade species. Silver maple and Siberian elm both form branch unions with included bark, and both are the trees that come apart in a June thunderstorm. Emerald ash borer arrived later, confirmed here in 2017 after a local arborist reported it, and it has been steadily subtracting the ash that filled in around them.