Lexington County, SC Landscaping Rules: Tree Trimming (2026)

Sec. 14-131 sits in Division 3 of the county's Landscape and Open Space Ordinance, adopted by Ord. No. 21-14 on November 30, 2021, and governs how required landscaping, street frontage trees, buffer plantings, parking lot trees and similar development-mandated vegetation, must be installed and kept up in the unincorporated county. Subsection (2)(d) sets the maintenance rule: newly planted trees must be properly sited and root-protected, and all required vegetation must conform to ANSI A300 pruning, planting, staking and maintenance standards. The ordinance flatly bars "topping or canopy reduction" of these trees and requires them to be allowed to grow in their natural form.

The one carve-out is clearance pruning, which the ordinance allows "when necessary for sight distance, building clearance, or the ingress/egress of utilities, vehicles, and/or pedestrians," with additional detail in the ordinance's appendix. Subsection (2)(e) backs this with a replacement duty: any required tree that dies must be replaced within 45 days, though the landscape administrator can extend that window for seasonal or unusual planting conditions, and a protected trophy tree removed to make way for clearance pruning or construction must instead be replaced under the Sec.

14-131(3)e mitigation measures. Because this article governs development-required landscaping rather than a general municipal street-tree program, its clearance pruning rule applies to trees planted or preserved to satisfy a landscape permit, not to every tree on private property; homeowners maintaining tree cover outside a permitted development plan are not directly bound by Sec. 14-131's pruning standard, though the county's vision clearance triangle rule in the Appendix B zoning ordinance separately requires clearing vegetation between two and a half and ten feet in height at intersections for sight distance.