Level in front, falling away out back

Working a plan built on a grade

The back slope is where most of our Kennedy Township calls end up. A tree standing on that edge cannot be felled, because the only open ground in the picture is the flat lawn behind us and the tree is leaning the other way. So the rigging runs uphill. The climber ties in above each cut, the ground crew takes the weight on lines, and every piece gets brought back onto the level yard instead of turned loose down the bank. It is more rope and more hands than the same tree would take out front, and it is the difference between a finished job and a mess spread across a hillside you would need boots and a rope to walk back into. Once the wood is on grass we can reach it with the chipper, and the slope never gets touched at all.

The other half of the story is the trees themselves. When these plans were built out, every new owner put a shade tree in the front lawn, and forty and fifty and sixty years later those maples are still there and they are not the size anybody pictured. A silver maple planted on a terrace pad has roots that ran into the only soft ground available, which is usually the fill behind the wall holding the terrace up, and a crown that has grown out past the pad it was planted on. Now it hangs over the porch roof on one side and the neighbor’s driveway on the other, with a trunk that split into two leaders around the time the second owners moved in. We look hard at that union. Sometimes it is sound and the answer is taking end weight off and pulling deadwood, which buys a good tree another decade. Sometimes it has bark folded down inside it and the honest answer is a removal before a wet August wind makes the decision for everybody.

Then there are the hollows. Between the plans, the wooded runs are still there doing what they have always done, and the houses that back onto them inherit an edge nobody maintains. Volunteer growth pushes uphill into the yard a few feet a year, wild grape and vine pull the lower limbs down, and the mature trees along the edge quietly build up deadwood forty feet over a swing set. That is the deadwood patrol call, and it is one of the most useful visits we make here: an afternoon in the crowns pulling out everything hanging and everything dead, plus clearing the brush back to a line you choose, and suddenly the back of the property is usable again instead of something you keep the kids away from.

Stumps matter more here than on flat ground. A terraced yard already has less real estate on it, and a stump left in the middle of the good part of that lawn is in the way of everything you do out there for the next twenty years. We grind them out the same visit the tree comes down, because the machine is already on the trailer in your driveway and a return trip costs everyone time nobody needs to spend. The exception is out on the bank itself, where a root system can be earning its keep holding soil. We will say which one you have while we are standing on it, not afterward.

Access gets planned before the day, not on the morning of. Some of these streets are narrow enough that the chipper and the dump trailer need a spot worked out ahead of time, and a few of the older plans have driveways that come off the street at an angle a loaded trailer will not make. We scout that when we come out to look at the tree. It is the same one visit, whole job, wood hauled, lawn raked promise we run everywhere in Allegheny County, just performed on ground where half the yard is uphill of the other half.

People here have been straight with us and we return it. Kennedy Township is a working township, folks keep their lawns tight and their driveways clean, and nobody has patience for a contractor who shows up with a big number and a longer story. You get told what the tree is doing, what it needs, what it does not need, and a number up front that covers the cleanup too. If pruning solves it we say so, and we say it before we have sold you anything.