Clarksville, TN Landscaping Rules: Tree Trimming (2026)

Section 12-109 of the Official Code of the City of Clarksville, carried forward from Code 1963 Section 25-10, places the trimming duty squarely on the people who own or occupy the abutting land: property owners and tenants are required to keep their trees and shrubbery so trimmed that they do not impede, obstruct, interfere with, or endanger the free flow of traffic in and upon abutting public ways. The section sits in the same short run of Chapter 12 provisions covering barricades, downtown signage clearance, doors and gates, and thrown trash, all aimed at keeping the public street, alley, and sidewalk network open.

Because the duty is worded broadly, covering anything that impedes, obstructs, interferes with, or endangers, it reaches low branches over a sidewalk just as much as shrubs crowding a street-side lane, and it applies to both the record owner and any tenant in possession, so a landlord cannot point to a lease to escape responsibility. The very next relevant section in the same chapter, Sec. 12-113, lets the city step in when an unauthorized obstruction over a public way is not cleared voluntarily: it authorizes the city to remove the obstruction and assess the cost to the person responsible once that person is identified.

Read alongside Sec. 12-109, overgrown limbs that a property owner leaves hanging over a sidewalk fall within the kind of obstruction Sec. 12-113 lets the city clear and bill for, which is the chapter's practical enforcement backstop for a trimming duty that carries no fine of its own.