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.” So you mow it, you weed it, and you repair the snow-plow damage within one growing season. However, the City decides what grows in it. That is the first thing any tree service Countryside residents hire has to understand. Furthermore, anything else you put there stops at three feet in height, city-planted trees and approved plans excepted.

Request An Estimate

Chapter 6-12 Names The Diseases

Countryside’s tree law lives in Chapter 6-12, “Landscaping and Public Way Maintenance.” Within it, Section 6-12-3 is headed “Trees, Shrubs.” It prohibits dead trees, large dead tree branches, and trees or shrubs infected with injurious insects, pests or plant diseases. It then declares specific nuisances by name. Those are elm trees with Dutch elm disease, dead elm wood, ash trees infected with emerald ash borer, and lightning-damaged trees. In every case the owner pays for removal. 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.” So the grinding is not optional tidying here. Instead it is part of the removal. Anyone quoting you a removal in Countryside without stump work is quoting an incomplete job. Therefore the grinding belongs in any tree service Countryside quote you agree to.

What Tree Service Countryside Rules Leave Out

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, not size. In other words it is dead, diseased or dangerous. Section 6-12-6 covers notification of violations, abatement, penalties and liens. However, its text is not published anywhere we can cite. So ask Community Development at 803 Joliet Road, at 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 northwest 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. That is 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. Those trees are sixty years old now, on lots where nobody has moved often enough to replace them. So the choice between structural pruning and removal genuinely matters. Moreover, that is 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. Instead its flooding is pinpointed rather than widespread. The named spots are 5550 Plainfield Road, 5401 7th Avenue, and the 55th Street and La Grange Road intersection. Branch pickup runs April to October. Branches under three inches in diameter go on the parkway for Public Works to collect. However, whether contractor-cut material qualifies is not stated in anything we can cite. So 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.