Emergency Tree Service in Ridgewood, NJ

Ridgewood's canopy is a century old, and it grew up over the houses.

Ridgewood is a commuter village that filled in around its railroad station in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and a lot of it still looks that way: Colonial Revival, Tudor, and Victorian houses on deep lots, with oaks, maples, and tulip trees that were planted or left standing when the streets were laid out. In Upper Ridgewood the lots get larger and the land rolls, and the trees get bigger with them. Very few houses here have a big tree that couldn't reach the roof.

That canopy has taken real losses. After Irene, Sandy, and the October 2011 snowstorm, which dropped heavy wet snow on trees still in full leaf across northern New Jersey, the village council moved in 2013 to set up a volunteer shade tree commission to replant what had been lost. When Tropical Storm Isaias came through on August 4, 2020, PSE&G counted more than 3,000 outages in Ridgewood that night, and one tree on West Glen Avenue sat on top of two parked cars for two days before it was cleared.

Ida in September 2021 was a rain storm more than a wind storm, but it still put more than a thousand village customers in the dark. Soaked soil is the common thread. Ridgewood's big shade trees rarely fail on a dry day; they fail when the ground is saturated and the wind comes after it.