Care for the curb oaks Forest Hills was built around

Planned around trees a hundred years ago

Most Pittsburgh boroughs got their trees as an afterthought, squeezed into whatever ground was left over once the houses and the sidewalks were in. Forest Hills went the other way. The streets bend with the hillside, the lots were drawn generous, and the planting strips got real width because whoever drew the plan expected mature shade to be the point of living here. A century on, that decision is standing in front of every house on the block, sixty and seventy feet of oak with a trunk you cannot get your arms around.

Trees that old and that well placed are worth real money to a property, and they are also the reason our phone rings. A curb oak that has never been touched carries a lot of dead wood high in the crown, and dead wood in an oak stays up there for years looking fine until the day it lets go over a parked car. Reduction pruning is most of what we do here. We pull weight off the ends of the longest limbs so the tree stops levering itself in wind, clear the deadwood out of the interior, and leave the shape looking like a tree rather than a haircut. Done right, nobody driving past can tell we were there except that nothing is hanging anymore.

Slate roofs and chimneys under wide crowns

The housing stock here is brick and stone with a good share of Tudor, which means steep pitches, original slate, and tall chimneys sitting right where an oak limb wants to be. Slate does not take a hit. A piece of oak that would bounce off asphalt shingle goes straight through it, and the repair costs more than the pruning did, if you can even source matching slate. So nothing gets dropped over these roofs. The climber ties in above the cut, takes short pieces, and every one comes down on a rigging line to somebody on the ground.

Chimneys get their own attention. Limbs growing over a flue trap heat and drop debris straight down it, and the clearance a chimney needs is more than most people expect. When we are already up in a crown for other reasons, opening a proper gap around the stack costs almost nothing extra and saves a conversation with a chimney sweep later. Same standard we hold everywhere in Allegheny County, applied to houses where a mistake shows for the next fifty years.

When the drop zone is the street itself

Here is the part of Forest Hills work that other trades do not think about. On a curving street with a big curb oak, there is no yard to put the tree in. The planting strip is four feet wide, the sidewalk is behind it, and the only open ground is the road. So the road is where the wood lands, and that changes the whole plan for the day.

We set cones and a spotter, keep the closure short and moving, and time the work so we are not blocking a street when everybody is trying to get out in the morning. Pieces come down small and controlled rather than in the big satisfying sections you could take in an open field. It is slower. It is also the only way to do it without somebody’s bumper paying for our convenience. Neighbors get told the day before when we expect to be in front of their house, because in a borough this size the goodwill matters more than the extra half hour.

The curve of the streets adds a wrinkle most people miss. Sight lines are short, so a truck parked at the outside of a bend is invisible until a driver is nearly on it. We stage where we can be seen coming, and if that means walking gear an extra hundred feet, we walk it. Bigger removals on these blocks often bring crane support instead, because a crane lifts the wood straight up and out of the street rather than laying it down in the middle of it. That decision gets made at the walk-around, not on the day.

Wind off the Ardmore corridor

The lower end of the borough, where the land opens out toward Ardmore Boulevard and Route 30, catches wind the sheltered upper streets never feel. Trees that grew up in the calm interior of a canopy and then lost a neighbor to disease or construction suddenly find themselves exposed, and an oak that spent eighty years leaning on the trees around it does not adapt quickly. Those are the ones that come apart in a summer line of storms.

If a tree near you came down last season and yours is now standing alone where it used to have company, that is worth a look before the next round of weather. Usually it is a pruning job, not a removal: weight off the windward side, deadwood cleared, and the tree gets a few years to thicken up. Call (412) 526-2028 when something does let go, any hour. We make the dangerous part safe first, photograph everything for your insurance while it is still where it landed, and schedule the rest around you.

Straight answers about which trees stay

People in this borough are protective of their trees, and they should be. So we say plainly when a tree does not need to come down, and that is more often than you would think. A hollow at the base is not automatically fatal. A big oak with sound wood in a ring around a hollow center can stand for decades. What we look at is how much sound shell is left, whether the root plate has lifted, whether there are fungal bodies at the flare, and how much of the crown is still leafing out in July.

When the answer is that careful pruning buys you fifteen more years, that is what we recommend and that is the number you get. When the answer is that the tree is done, we say that too, and we say why in words that make sense standing in your driveway. Either way the number is up front and in writing before anybody starts a saw.