GRL Landscaping & Tree Services

GRL Landscaping & Tree Services, based in Lynn, gets called for the job nobody wants to tackle alone: a rotted tree resting on a roof, a yard of oaks and maples that need to come down, storm damage tangled in power lines. Google shows 4.8 stars across 142 ratings, built on a 134-review history across four sources since 2023, and the pattern holds steady rather than drifting. The last six months back that up with real urgency. In June, a tree limb came down on a neighbor's house and had rotted through inside — the crew removed what was left that same night, threading a boom lift around power lines and tight obstacles without damage. In March, a customer who'd gone 10 days without power after an underground fault called at noon; the property was surveyed by 4:30pm and the trees needed for a new overhead line were cleared by 10am the next morning. Reviewers keep circling back to the same two things: how fast the crew shows up, and how clean they leave the property once the trees are down. The one sour note from the last six months is a customer who says GRL quoted thousands of dollars for a job arranged informally through a neighbor, then pushed an upsell before cutting the price at the end of the day — worth asking for a firm, written quote up front to avoid that kind of back-and-forth. It isn't a one-off shape either: an older complaint in the broader review history describes agreed-on branches that weren't all removed, with a follow-up visit the crew reportedly wanted to charge for. Landscaping does show up alongside the tree work — a yard left unattended for a decade got cleared "from tree work to shrubs to the landscaping" in one April visit, and stump grinding after shrub and bush removal comes up more than once. Even so, tree removal, pruning, and stump work are clearly what the bulk of these reviews describe. There's no license listed here, and that's expected: Massachusetts doesn't license landscaping or tree work the way it does plumbing or electrical trades, so its absence isn't a mark against them. For tree work — routine pruning or an after-the-storm emergency — the response times and cleanup habits hold up across a genuinely deep review history. For a full landscaping project, it's worth confirming directly what the design and installation side can handle rather than assuming it from the tree-service reviews.