McCandless has older trees than it has houses

Forest trees with houses under them

Drive the wooded plans between Ingomar and Perry Highway and you can read the history off the canopy. Builders in the sixties, seventies and eighties dropped colonials and split-levels into existing woods and left as much of it standing as the grading would allow. Those white oaks and red maples were mature timber then. Two generations later they are enormous, and the difference between a McCandless job and an inner North Hills job is usually forty feet of height and a trunk you cannot get your arms around.

Bigger lots also mean homeowners here keep trees longer, which we like. A tree that would have crowded a small postwar parcel still has room to breathe on a half acre off Babcock or Cumberland, so it stays, and it keeps adding wood. The tradeoff is that when one finally has to go, it is a serious piece of work. That is why so much of our schedule in this town is crane-supported removal rather than climb-and-rope alone. Setting a crane on a plan street takes planning, a look at the driveway and the turnaround, and a conversation with the neighbor whose curb we might borrow for two hours. We do that part before the day of, not during it.

Weather here has its own pattern. Cells track up the McKnight corridor and hit a whole plan at once, so the phone does not ring with one call, it rings with six from the same three streets. Original forest trees make that worse in a specific way: they grew up inside a closed canopy, sheltered by neighbors, and then the neighbors got cleared for lots. A tree that spent forty years leaning on the wind protection of the woods around it can be surprisingly exposed once it is standing alone in a side yard.

North Park sits right on the town’s shoulder, and people who walk it every weekend know what a healthy stand of mature hardwood is supposed to look like. Nobody in McCandless is impressed by a tree that has been topped. So a real share of the work here is preservation pruning: clearing deadwood, reducing end weight over the roofline, opening structure so a big crown moves with a storm instead of fighting it. Done right, it buys a good tree another twenty or thirty years, which is cheaper and better looking than replacing it. We work this way across Allegheny County, but the trees up here reward it the most.

The split-levels get their own version of the problem. On a split, the low roof off the back is often the closest thing to a mature crown on the whole property, and it collects everything the tree drops. We see gutters packed solid with oak tassels every spring, moss on the shingles that never dries because the canopy never opens, and limbs that have grown down to meet the roofline because that is where the light was. Lifting the crown off that low roof is a small job with a large payoff, and it is worth doing before the shingles start telling the story for you.

Access on these properties is its own puzzle. Deeper lots mean the tree we are after is often a hundred feet behind the house with a deck, a fence, a shed and somebody’s raised beds between it and the street. We plan the drop zone and the drag path first, put plywood down where the turf is soft, and take the brush out the way we came in. A rutted lawn is not a finished job. The photo at the top of this page is what we mean by that: the tree work is over and the only evidence left is that something used to be standing there.

Stumps get treated the same way. On the bigger parcels up here people often have room to leave one, and every so often that is the right call if it is out of sight in the tree line. But a forest-grown oak leaves a stump with a root flare wider than a patio table, and that is not something you mow around or plant over. Most McCandless removals finish with the grinder taking it well below grade the same visit, chips raked back into the hole, topsoil and seed if you want the lawn closed up. One trip, whole job, done.