Ben Avon hired us to keep its old trees standing

A borough built around its canopy

Ben Avon is roughly a third of a square mile of houses that mostly went up between the 1890s and the 1920s, and the planting went in right along with them. That timing is the whole story. The oaks, maples and lindens shading these streets are not landscape features somebody added later, they are the same age as the porches they hang over, and a lot of them are pushing well past a century. A tree that old is a different animal from a forty year old yard tree. It has healed wounds you cannot see, unions that have been carrying weight for decades, and a root system running under a sidewalk that got poured around it.

So the work here skews heavily toward keeping things alive. Careful reduction and deadwood removal instead of blunt shortening. Cuts at the collar so the tree can actually seal them. Clearing the crown over a slate roof or a third floor dormer without stripping the interior bare and leaving a mess of weak shoots to fix in five years. Good pruning on a heritage tree should be nearly invisible from the sidewalk, and the tree should look like itself the following spring.

Old trees also come with old wounds, and that is where support hardware earns its keep. A big maple with two codominant leaders and a seam of included bark between them is a common Ben Avon shape, and it is exactly the shape that splits in a wet snow. If the tree is otherwise healthy, cabling the leaders together high in the canopy can carry it another couple of decades. Not every candidate qualifies, and Chris will say so if the wood is already too far gone to hold hardware, but plenty of trees people assume are done are actually just under-supported.

The other half of the job here is the ground under the tree. Lots are narrow, and what sits below the drip line is somebody’s perennial bed, a slate walk, an iron fence that has been there since the Coolidge administration, or all three at once. That drives every decision we make about access and rigging. Brush comes down onto tarps, not onto plantings. Heavy sections get roped and lowered rather than dropped. We plan where the chipper parks before the truck ever pulls up, because the alley or the strip of curb by your steps may be the only way in, and rutting a yard on a lot this size is not a small thing.

When removal is genuinely the right call, and sometimes it is, we say it plainly and then do it surgically. A dead ash over a driveway, a trunk hollowed out from an old topping wound, a root plate lifting after a saturated spring. Those come out in controlled pieces on ropes, with the beds boarded over and the fence protected, and the stump ground below grade so the spot can be replanted. Then we clean up like the yard belonged to us. Same crew and same standard we hold across Allegheny County, only here the trees have neighbors watching them.

Being in the river valley matters too. Storms funnel up the Ohio, ice loads sit on brittle old wood, and a Ben Avon block can go from picturesque to blocked in twenty minutes. If a limb is down across your walk or resting on a wire at two in the morning, call. We make the situation safe first, then come back in daylight to look at what else took damage up top, because the worst storm injuries are usually the cracks nobody can see from the ground.