Maples are more than half the street trees around here: Norway, silver, sugar, red. So when somebody calls about a tree that "doesn't look right," odds are good it's a maple. The question is never is something wrong. It's whether pruning buys you another twenty years or just buys you a bill before the takedown.
Start with the trunk, not the branches
Homeowners look up. We look at the base first. A crown full of deadwood on a solid trunk is a pruning job. A clean-looking crown on a trunk with a soft spot, a seam of decay, or mushrooms at the flare is a removal conversation, no matter how green the leaves are.
You can't prune structure back into a hollow trunk. The shell holds the tree up, not the middle. Once that solid ring gets thin, all pruning does is reduce the sail on top and hope. Fine on a tree in the middle of a field. Bad on a tree twelve feet off a Park Avenue porch.
Silver maple: the local special case
Silver maple is the tree that made 1991 famous. Seventeen hours of freezing rain on March 3rd and 4th took out over 10,000 trees inside the city and knocked out power for 750,000 people, and silver maple got hit worse than anything. The part people forget: well-maintained, structurally sound trees came through it far better. That's still the argument for pruning.
Silvers have that V-shaped crotch with included bark: two or three codominant stems shoving against each other instead of growing together. Brittle wood on top of that. The split:
- Savable: the union is tight but not yet cracked, the stems are reasonably balanced, the trunk below is sound. Structural pruning to reduce the weight on the weaker stem, sometimes a cable up in the canopy, and you keep the tree.
- Not savable: the crotch has already split and the crack runs down into the trunk. Once it's into the stem, a cable is holding two halves of a broken tree over your roof. We've cabled plenty of trees. We won't cable that one.
Storm-topped trees
Lake-effect snow off Ontario is dense and wet, so limbs come down in snowfalls that don't even make the news. After a Nor'easter we get a lot of "half the top is gone, can you clean it up?"
We work from how much of the live crown is gone. Lose a third or less and the tree usually recovers with proper cuts back to good laterals. Lose more than half and you're looking at a tree that'll push weak water sprouts off the stubs for years. Those are attached to bark, not wood, and they're the limbs that come down in the next ice event. Topped trees don't get stronger. They get busier.
Leaners
A lean by itself means nothing. Half the old maples in Corn Hill lean toward the street because that's where the light was in 1930. What matters is whether the lean is new. Cracked or heaving soil opposite the lean, lifting roots, a gap at the flare: that's a tree moving, and it goes. Old lean, buttressed flare on the tension side, no soil disturbance? That one grew that way.
Then there's the target. Same tree, same defect: over a back lawn in Avon it might be worth watching a couple seasons. Over a bedroom on a tight city lot, we're not gambling. Risk is defect plus what's underneath it.
Ash is a different question entirely
If it's green ash, stop wondering. Emerald ash borer showed up at Upper Falls Park on St. Paul Street in June 2011, and Monroe County has some of the densest ash in the state. Untreated ash here is on borrowed time. Dead ash goes brittle fast. It doesn't bend, it lets go. Don't put a ladder in one. And Monroe County sits inside the state's EAB Restricted Zone, so the wood can't leave with your buddy's trailer.
The permit part people get wrong
This changes block to block, which is genuinely confusing. In the City of Rochester, removing a private tree 6 inches or more in diameter generally needs a permit with a $90 fee. But owner-occupants of a one-family parcel under an acre are exempt, and so are dead, diseased, damaged or hazard trees. Those exemptions do not cover landmark trees or anything in the tree lawn. Street trees belong to the City Forester Division (585-428-7581, or 311); you can't take one down yourself.
Cross into Brighton and it's Chapter 175: permits on parcels over an acre, and a development permit for anything over 5 inches inside the Woodlot Protection District. Out in Brockport the village only regulates public, right-of-way, park and easement trees. Confirm with your own town; don't assume the neighbor two miles away is under the same rules.
Cost, roughly: most removals here land between $400 and $2,500, with 50-to-80-footers at $1,200-$2,000. Stump grinding runs $100-$400, and maple grinds slow. Bundle the stump with the removal; a separate trip costs more every time.
If you're not sure which side of the line your maple falls on, get eyes on the base of it before spring thaw opens the frost cracks and shows you what winter did. Send us a photo and an address. Half of these get answered off the trunk shot alone, and we'll tell you straight if it's a pruning job. We'd rather keep the tree when the tree can be kept.