Tree Care in Countryside, Illinois

You may not plant a tree in your own parkway in Countryside. Section 6-12-4 puts the maintenance of front, side and rear parkways on the adjacent owner. It then states that “trees are not allowed to be planted in a residential public parkway other than by the City of Countryside.” You mow it, you weed it, you repair the snow-plow damage within one growing season. The City decides what grows in it, which is the first thing any tree service Countryside residents hire has to understand. Anything else you put there is capped at three feet in height, city-planted trees and approved plans excepted.

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Chapter 6-12 Names The Diseases

Countryside’s tree law lives in Chapter 6-12, “Landscaping and Public Way Maintenance.” Section 6-12-3, headed “Trees, Shrubs,” prohibits dead trees, large dead tree branches, and trees or shrubs infected with injurious insects or pests or with plant diseases. It then declares specific nuisances by name: elm trees with Dutch elm disease, dead elm wood, ash trees infected with emerald ash borer, and lightning-damaged trees. All are removed at the owner’s expense. University of Illinois Extension is the plainest source on how each of those shows itself.

The section carries one instruction that homeowners regularly find out about too late. “When a dead or infected tree is removed, the stump shall be removed below the surface of the ground so that the top of the stump shall not project above the surface of the ground.” The grinding is not optional tidying here, it is part of the removal. Anyone quoting you a removal in Countryside without stump work is quoting an incomplete job. The grinding belongs in any tree service Countryside quote you agree to.

What is absent is as useful as what is present. There is no removal permit requirement in Chapter 6-12 and no DBH threshold at all. On private ground, the trigger is condition — dead, diseased, dangerous — not size. Section 6-12-6 covers notification of violations, abatement, penalties and liens, but its text is not published anywhere we can cite. Ask Community Development at 803 Joliet Road on 708-354-1860 before assuming what a notice will demand.

A 1960 City On Route 66

Countryside is young as municipalities go, incorporated in 1960. It sits on 2.88 square miles north-west of I-55 and I-294, about fifteen miles from the Chicago Loop. It borders Western Springs, La Grange, Willow Springs, Hodgkins, McCook, Indian Head Park and Burr Ridge — seven neighbors for a city of roughly 6,420 people. Historic Route 66, here called Joliet Road, runs through the southern part.

Housing is stable and owner-held: 72.0 percent owner-occupied, median owner-occupied value $324,700, median household income $80,968. A 1960s incorporation with high owner occupancy produces a specific tree situation. There is a large cohort of specimens planted by first owners in the sixties and seventies, now sixty years old, on lots where nobody has moved often enough to have replaced them. Those trees are reaching the age where the choice between structural pruning and removal genuinely matters, and where the emerald ash borer clause at 6-12-3 starts to bite. That cohort is where most of the tree service Countryside now needs begins.

Countryside has no FEMA repetitive-loss properties. Its flooding is pinpointed rather than widespread: 5550 Plainfield Road, 5401 7th Avenue, and the 55th Street and La Grange Road intersection. Branch pickup runs April to October, with branches under three inches in diameter placed on the parkway for Public Works to collect. Whether contractor-cut material qualifies is not stated in anything we can cite, which is why we take ours with us. The city is not a Tree City USA.

Our Countryside Services

• Removals of the nuisance categories 6-12-3 names by name, including EAB-infected ash
• Pruning of the 1960s and 1970s planting cohort before it becomes a removal
• Stump grinding below grade, exactly as the ordinance requires
• Emergency and storm response, any hour of the day or night

Arrange A Tree Service Countryside Estimate

Give us the address and, if it is an ash, roughly how much of the crown has thinned. That tells us more than a photograph does. Estimates are free, and we will tell you if the tree has time left.

Call 708-424-5885. See our Cook County service area, plus Indian Head Park and Hodgkins, Western Springs.