The crew that fits on a Ben Avon Heights lane

A borough under one continuous roof of leaves

Drive up out of Ben Avon proper and the light changes. The Heights sits on top of the hill, the lanes curve instead of running straight, and the canopy overhead is more or less unbroken from one end of the borough to the other. That continuous cover is the whole character of the place and the reason people pay to live under it. It is also the reason the tree work here has to be thought through rather than muscled through.

Most of what we do up here is canopy management. Storybook rooflines with steep pitches and a lot of valley collect every twig a big oak drops, so we lift and thin over the house before the gutters and the flashing pay for it. Limbs that hang low over the lane itself get raised for clearance, because a delivery truck or a fire apparatus needs the same headroom your car does. Regular trimming on a two or three year cycle is cheaper and less disruptive than one dramatic intervention after something fails, and on a street where every tree is somebody’s view, less dramatic is the point.

Then there is the wind. Sitting on a hilltop means the mature trees here take gusts that the sheltered streets down along the river never feel, and they take them from every direction with nothing upwind to break the force. Tall crowns on shallow, ridge-top soil are the ones we watch: heavy one-sided leads, old wounds at a union, a root plate that has been quietly heaving in wet weather. When a summer front or a February gale gets through and something comes down, we run storm cleanup the same way we run everything else in the Heights, which is one lane at a time so nobody is boxed in on the hill.

Access is the part that separates a crew that has worked here from one that has not. There is no shoulder to pull onto and often nowhere to turn around, so equipment staging gets decided before the day starts. Sometimes that means the chipper parks two houses down and we drag brush, sometimes it means a smaller machine and more trips, sometimes it means asking a neighbor for twenty feet of driveway for an afternoon. We ask, we say when we will be gone, and we sweep up. That is not a courtesy add-on, it is the only way a job on a lane this narrow finishes clean.

Because the borough is small, work here tends to travel. One removal on a lane and by the end of the week two more neighbors have walked over to ask about their own trees, which is how most of our Heights work arrives. When that happens we will group them: one mobilization, one lane closure, one round of cleanup, everybody’s trees handled while the equipment is already up the hill. It is easier on the street and it puts a better number in front of each homeowner than three separate visits ever would. It also means the noise and the mess happen once instead of three times in a month, which on a lane where the houses sit this close together matters more than people expect.

Underneath all of it, the soil deserves a mention. Hilltop lots here have been built on, regraded and re-driveway’d for a century, and old trees end up with fill over the root zone or compacted ground where a patio went in. The crown thins out on top a few seasons later and everyone blames the weather. When we see that pattern we say so, because pruning a tree with a struggling root system only buys a little time. Often the fix is nothing more complicated than keeping equipment and traffic off the root zone and letting the tree recover on its own schedule. Same standard we hold everywhere in Allegheny County, applied to a canopy the whole borough shares.