Emergency Tree Service in Hockessin, DE

In Hockessin, the houses were built into the woods, and the woods are still there.

Hockessin is the hilly, wooded corner of northern New Castle County, up against the Pennsylvania line. It isn't an incorporated town; it's a community of winding roads like Limestone Road, Lancaster Pike, and Old Lancaster Pike, with neighborhoods tucked into the rolling Piedmont between older farms and preserved land. Many homes sit on large lots with tall tulip poplars, oaks, and beeches left standing when the houses went in, often along a long driveway that's the only way in or out.

That canopy carries over into Yorklyn and the Red Clay Creek valley, and east toward Greenville and Centreville along the Kennett Pike. Places like the Ashland Nature Center and Mt. Cuba Center show what the native forest here looks like, and plenty of private lots look much the same. The steep, wooded slopes and creek bottoms mean that in long rains the ground softens and big trees can come down roots and all. The remnants of Ida in September 2021 dropped more than four inches of rain on Hockessin and pushed Red Clay Creek at Wooddale into moderate flood.

Summer thunderstorms do a lot of the damage here, too. On August 7, 2023, a line of storms left more than 37,000 Delmarva Power customers without power, with some of the largest outages in Hockessin, and trees fell onto homes there badly enough that residents had to be rescued.