Preparation

• One of the most important parts of safe shrub removal is acquiring the correct personal protective equipment. This includes long pants and a long-sleeved shirt to protect yourself from scratches from the shrubs you are removing. You also should guard your hands from the coarse texture of shrubs using gloves, and wear goggles to shield your eyes from pokes.
  
  

Steps

• To remove a shrub safely, first take off all the smaller branches on the outside of the shrub using tools called bypass loppers. This will give you better access to the more massive branches in the inner part of the shrub. After reaching these bigger inner branches, use a chainsaw to cut through them. This will get the thick and heavy branches out of your way, thus making removing the entire shrub much easier and safer.
  
  

Other Steps

• After sawing off the shrub's thick internal branches, use a pointed shovel to start digging in the ground around the shrub's stump. Doing this helps loosen the shrub from its place in the ground. Once the bottom part of the shrub begins to move and the shrub roots become more visible, use a garden mattock to chop through them to loosen the shrub further. You then can remove the shrub entirely.
  
  

Option

• If you want to remove a shrub safely without destroying the foliage -- if you want to transplant the shrub elsewhere, for example -- simply dig a hole about twice as wide as the estimated size of the shrub's root ball. Use a pointed shovel to do this. Then dig under the shrub's root ball using a transplanting shovel that has a straight blade.
  
  With another person's help, push the entire shrub over on the ground and put a piece of plastic under the root ball area. Put the rest of the shrub on the plastic, and use this plastic to drag the shrub away from the digging site.