Verona has a flat half and a steep half

Two addresses, two different trees

Tell us your street in Verona and we can usually guess the tree before we get there. The flat grid between the boulevard and the water grows the giants. Cottonwood and sycamore found the old river soil down there decades ago and never looked back, and now there are trunks on those blocks that three people could not reach around. They are magnificent from the sidewalk. They are also sitting on lots that were platted for a house, a yard and a garage, which means the crown covers your roof, your neighbor’s roof and about forty feet of public street all at once.

Those bottomland trees also grow the wrong way for a small lot. A cottonwood puts its weight way out on the ends of long horizontal limbs, and the wood it makes doing that is soft. It does not need a storm to shed something. A humid afternoon with no wind at all will do it, which is why so much of our large tree removal work down here starts with a homeowner describing a limb that came off out of nowhere. Sycamore does the same trick with less drama and more mess, peeling bark in plates all summer until the yard looks like somebody unpacked a crate in it.

Now walk two blocks toward the hill and the whole conversation changes. The streets climbing toward Penn Hills back up against wooded hollows, and those hollows drain straight down through people’s yards. What grows on that back property line was never chosen by anybody. It seeded in from the woods above, which is why the back of a Verona hillside lot is a jumble of black locust, ailanthus, wild cherry and whatever maple got there first, all grown in tight and all leaning downhill toward the house.

That is a genuinely different kind of risk from the river trees, and people underrate it because a volunteer tree looks small next to a cottonwood. The trouble is not size, it is anchorage. Those trees are rooted in thin soil over shale on ground that stays wet because it is the drainage path for everything above it. They grew fast and crowded, reaching for light instead of building a trunk, so they are tall, skinny and top-heavy with almost nothing holding the base. A wet March plus one hard west wind takes them over in groups. When we get called to a Verona hillside after a storm, it is rarely one tree down. It is four or five that went like dominoes.

So on the hill we mostly work from the top of the property down, and we look at the whole back line rather than the single tree somebody called about. Half the time the tree in the photo is the healthiest one back there. We will say that plainly, point at the two behind it that are actually the problem, and let you decide. Selective thinning of a wild back line, taking out the leaners and the dead locust and leaving the sound wood room to thicken up, does more for a Verona hillside than removing the one tree closest to the deck.

The flat streets have their own logistics, and it comes down to the alley. Verona’s older blocks put the garage at the back with a service alley behind it, so a lot of the time the alley is the only route the wood can take. That decides the whole day. The chip truck goes in the alley, the pieces come out the back, and we keep the lane passable the entire time so your neighbors can still get to their own garages. What we will not do is leave a brush pile sitting behind somebody’s house overnight because we ran out of daylight.

Being a small borough cuts both ways when weather comes through. Verona does not have a public works department the size of a township’s, so after a real storm the borough crew is stretched across every street at once and the tree in your driveway waits its turn. That is not a knock on them, it is arithmetic. It does mean private calls here matter more than they do in a bigger municipality, and we keep room in the schedule for exactly that. If a hillside tree has come across the drive at ten at night, the phone gets answered and we make it safe before we talk about anything else.

The rest of the year, the useful move on either half of the borough is getting ahead of it. A river-flat giant that gets its long limbs shortened and its deadwood pulled every few years is a tree you can keep, and regular tree trimming is a whole lot cheaper than an emergency takedown and a new roof. A hillside back line that gets thinned before the leaners double in size stays manageable instead of turning into a clearing job. Either way you get the same thing from us: Chris walks it himself, tells you what has to go and what can wait, and the number is in writing before a saw comes off the truck. Same standard we hold everywhere in Allegheny County, whether the address is on the flat or halfway up the hill.