Park Forest, IL Tree Service

Park Forest rewrote its tree article from scratch on 16 August 2021, and one number in it should change where you put a driveway. Section 110-91 defines the critical root zone as extending “at least one and a half feet for every inch dbh” — half again the one-foot-per-inch rule most codes round here settle for. On a 30-inch oak that is a 45-foot radius the village expects respected, and in a village whose trees all went in at much the same time, there are a great many 30-inch trunks — which is why the tree service Park Forest lots need starts with the ground rather than the crown.

Request An Estimate

Ordinance 2163 And The Two Thirty-Day Clocks

Article IV of Chapter 110 was adopted by Ordinance No. 2163, and its philosophy sits at §110-96: “Tree removals have an impact on the entire village, whether on public or private land.” Its teeth, though, are aimed at public trees and at development, where a landscape plan consistent with Appendix A must carry a preservation or replacement plan and be “submitted, approved, and implemented prior to the start of any work.” Damage a public tree without authorization and §110-101 provides for a fine up to $1,000.00 per tree or shrub. We located no general private-property removal permit anywhere in the code.

For a homeowner the operative rules sit elsewhere, and both run thirty days. Section 18-290, in the housing maintenance code, is the important one: “If a dead tree constitutes a hazard to life or property, the owner shall be required to remove such tree within 30 days.” Section 110-66, the Dutch elm article, allows the same thirty days from the date notice is served or mailed and adds a requirement most codes omit — “the removal of any tree shall include the removal of the tree stump to below normal ground level.” A felled elm with the stump left proud is not a finished job here. University of Illinois Extension keeps current identification notes for Dutch elm disease, which still moves through stands of this age.

A Town That Was Planted On A Schedule

Most suburbs grew. This one was announced. On 28 October 1946, at the Palmer House Hilton, Nathan Manilow, Carroll F. Sweet and Philip M. Klutznick unveiled a plan to build an entire community for veterans coming home from the war, through American Community Builders. Elbert Peets shaped it, the county annex still calls it a “G.I. Town,” the village incorporated on 1 February 1949, and by 1956 William H. Whyte had made it the setting for The Organization Man. Today it holds 21,687 people over 4.96 square miles.

That history is a tree story. A community built to one plan gets its trees planted to that plan — the same few species, the same nursery stock, the same handful of seasons — and seventy-odd years on they reach the end of their structural lives on that schedule too. When four houses in a row shed limbs in one summer, nobody has been unlucky; they share a planting date. Tree service Park Forest streets need tends to arrive block by block for the same reason. The annex names the “mature tree canopy” outright as vulnerable, commits the village to replanting public trees under Action P-1.11, and lists Thorn Creek Estates, Sauk Lake, the Orchard Drive underpass, Sioux and Central Park and North Orchard as the places that flood. Tornadoes came through in 1967, 2008 and 2010.

What We Do On Park Forest Streets

• Removals from the aging original-planting cohort, worked around the 1.5-foot-per-inch root zone
• Structural pruning on trees never reduced and now carrying too much end weight
• Stump grinding to below grade, as §110-66 demands on diseased elms
• Storm and tornado response, day or night

Get A Tree Service Park Forest Quote

Tell us the address and whether the village has served a notice — the date on it starts a thirty-day clock, and we will schedule inside it. If a builder is working near a tree you want kept, get us in before the footings go in, not after.

Call 708-424-5885. See our Cook County service area, and nearby: Richton Park, University Park.