Franklin Park keeps its trees, so we keep them standing

An old canopy with nothing growing under it

Walk the back of almost any property off Nicholson or Rochester Road and you will notice the same thing we do. Overhead, a full canopy of oak and shagbark hickory that has been there since long before the borough was a borough. Underneath, bare ground. No saplings, no shrub layer, nothing between ankle height and forty feet. The deer here have eaten the understory down to the dirt over the last three decades, and the result is a beautiful woodlot with no next generation in it.

That matters more than it sounds. It means the trees shading these houses are the only trees these houses are going to get, and when one comes out there is nothing waiting to fill the hole. So the calculation up here is different than it is on a tighter lot in the inner North Hills. Homeowners want to hear whether the tree can be saved before they hear anything about taking it down, and that is the right instinct. It is also why so much of our schedule in Franklin Park is careful pruning rather than removal work.

Deer leave other marks worth knowing about. Bucks rub the bark off young trunks in the fall, and a rub that goes most of the way around a stem will kill a replacement tree you paid real money for. We see homeowners plant three river birches in a side yard, cage none of them, and lose two by the next spring. If you are replanting after a removal, ask us about protection before the shovel comes out. It costs almost nothing at planting and saves the whole tree.

The ravines are the other half of the story. Ground on the west side of the borough falls hard toward the runs that feed Big Sewickley Creek, and trees on those slopes grow with their root plates working sideways against gravity for their whole lives. Add a wet March, add a gusty front, and that is the phone call. A leaner over a ravine is not a routine job. The tree usually has to be dismantled from above with the rigging set so nothing swings downhill, and half the work is deciding where the pieces are allowed to land before the first cut.

Wind behaves strangely in the plans, too. Streets that curve through cleared pockets of woods act like a funnel, and we have watched one cul-de-sac lose four limbs while the street behind it lost nothing. The trees standing at the edge of a cleared lot take the worst of it, because they grew up sheltered by neighbors that are not there anymore. Those edge trees are the ones we look at first when a homeowner calls about storm damage, and they are the ones worth a preventive look before a storm rather than after one.

When a canopy oak actually dies over a house, that is a different animal. A dead white oak eighty feet up with a spread wider than the roof is not something anybody should be climbing, and it is not something you wait on. Those jobs get crane support, and the planning happens days ahead: where the truck sets up, how it gets down a winding road with no shoulder, which neighbor’s driveway we might need to borrow for two hours. Franklin Park roads were laid to follow the terrain rather than a grid, and a crane needs to know that before it is halfway up the hill.

Access is a real part of the price of working here. Deep lots mean the tree we are after can be two hundred feet behind the house, past a deck, a fence, a septic field and somebody’s garden. We plan the drag path first, put plywood down where the ground is soft, and take the brush out the way we came in. A rutted lawn is not a finished job. Stumps get the same attention. A forest-grown hickory leaves a root flare you cannot mow around or plant over, so most removals here finish with the grinder taking it below grade the same visit, chips raked into the hole, ready for topsoil. That is what one and done means, and it is how we work everywhere across Allegheny County.