First

Whose tree is it?

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A Township tree is a tree owned by the Township of Montclair on public property or in the right-of-way. Most trees between the sidewalk and the curb are Township trees; where there is no sidewalk, a tree within about ten feet of the curb usually is too.¹

Only Township personnel, or tree companies working for the Township, may prune or remove a Township tree.¹ If a tree is in the wrong condition, the fix is a phone call, not a saw.

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The stakes

Why the first years decide everything

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A transplanted tree arrives having lost a large share of the root system it grew in the nursery field. Published estimates range roughly from seventy to ninety-five percent for field-dug stock and vary with harvest method and species, so treat any single figure with caution. Until those roots regrow into the surrounding soil, the tree is drinking from a root ball roughly the size of a laundry basket, in compacted street soil, between hot asphalt and hot concrete.

Penn State Extension estimates establishment in USDA Zones 2 through 6 at about one year per inch of trunk diameter — so a typical two-inch street tree needs about two growing seasons of help, and a three-inch tree about three.³⁴

Lack of water is the leading reason newly planted trees do not survive.³

One

Water

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When

Don't assume rain is enough. Skip a scheduled watering only when there has been substantial rainfall over many hours — roughly an inch or more in twenty-four hours. An inch that falls in twenty minutes mostly runs off the pavement into the storm drain and does the tree little good.³

How much

This is where published guidance genuinely diverges, and it is worth understanding why.

• Penn State's watering article gives a minimum of one to one and a half gallons per inch of trunk diameter at each watering, on the frequent schedule above.³ The University of Minnesota's table is essentially identical.¹⁴
• Penn State's tree-planting article recommends twenty to forty gallons for a two-inch caliper tree, applied slowly and evenly over the root ball, each time it is watered — with frequency set by weather.⁴
• Most municipal street tree programs split the difference at fifteen to twenty gallons once a week, because that is what residents will actually sustain.

These are not three answers so much as three ways of hitting the same target. The test that matters is soil moisture, not gallons: water over the whole root zone until the top six to nine inches of soil is moist, and check with a probe, a soil knife, or a long screwdriver — moist soil is noticeably easier to penetrate than dry.³

A practical default for a typical Montclair street tree: fifteen gallons, poured slowly, on the schedule above, adjusted up in heat and down in cool wet stretches, always with a soil check.

How

• A watering bag releases about fifteen gallons over five to nine hours. It needs tending through the season and should come off for winter.³
• A slow hose trickle over the root ball. Time how long your hose takes to fill a five-gallon bucket at that setting, then multiply.
• The bucket method — two or three eighth-inch holes near the bottom of a five-gallon bucket; set it by the trunk, fill, let it drain, move it around the tree. The most laborious option, and the one that requires nothing you don't already own.³
• Water early in the morning to cut evaporation, and avoid spraying foliage and trunk.³
• Water the root zone, not just the trunk. For a young tree the absorbing roots are still within the planting hole, often for the whole first season.³

You can overwater

Roots need oxygen as well as water. Overwatering is as harmful as underwatering, particularly in the clay and compacted soils common on Montclair streets: pores that should hold oxygen fill with water, and roots waterlogged for more than about a day can suffocate. Watch for constantly damp soil, pale or yellowing new leaves, wilting young shoots, and algae or mushrooms at the surface.³

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Two

Mulch

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Mulch holds moisture, moderates soil temperature, suppresses weeds and grass, reduces compaction and erosion — and keeps mowers and trimmers off the trunk.⁵⁶ It is also, done wrong, one of the most common ways Americans kill their trees.

Rutgers documents exactly how a mulch volcano kills: trunk tissue cannot survive constant moisture, gas exchange through the bark's lenticels shuts down, and the inner bark — the phloem — dies. Decomposing mulch piled against the trunk can reach 120 to 140 degrees. Fungal and bacterial trunk diseases and borers follow. The tree does not die immediately. It declines.⁵

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Three

Keep the tree pit clear

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• Weeds and grass compete with the tree for water; managing them is part of tree care.³⁵
• Trash and dog waste. Municipal street tree programs consistently ask residents to keep pits clear of litter and animal waste, and to keep dogs off the pit.¹⁶¹⁷
• Nothing chained, nailed, stapled, or tied to the tree — bikes included. Anything wrapped around a trunk eventually girdles it as the trunk expands.¹⁶
• Don't pave, compact, or park on the root zone. Compacted soil is harder for roots — and for water — to penetrate.³
• Skip the flower bed. Planting annuals in a young tree pit means digging in the root ball and competing for water; a raised bed around the trunk has the same effect as volcano mulching.⁵

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Four

Winter

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• Never shovel or plow salted snow into a tree pit. Salt in the soil is taken up by roots, and the damage often doesn't show until late summer, long after anyone connects it to winter.¹⁰¹¹
• Shovel first, salt sparingly, scatter it. Mixing salt with sand, grit, or cinders improves traction while cutting the salt load.¹¹¹³
• "Tree-safe de-icer" is a marketing phrase, not a category. Calcium chloride, potassium chloride, and magnesium chloride are less damaging to plants than sodium chloride, but they are still salts and can still cause damage. Calcium magnesium acetate causes little or no plant damage and costs many times more. Sand and grit melt nothing but add traction with no salt at all.¹¹¹²¹³
• In spring, leach. Watering salt-affected soil thoroughly as it thaws helps flush accumulated salt below the root zone; foliage hit by spray can be rinsed with clean water.¹⁰¹²

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Five

Deer, rabbits, and the rest of the neighborhood

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A young street tree is a slender, smooth-barked stem at exactly the height a buck wants to rub and a rabbit wants to chew. In some parts of town some trees may experience some impact. That isn't a reason to see wildlife as the enemy — it's a reason to spend twenty dollars on a guard. Once the tree matures, the guard can come off. Nearly all of the issues below are prevented by one physical barrier, correctly installed and eventually removed. Rub season is temporary: bucks rub as they shed the velvet from their antlers each autumn, generally September through December.

What actually impacts a young tree

• Antler rub. In fall, bucks may rub their antlers against smooth-barked saplings, stripping bark in vertical strips. This can make the young tree more vulnerable. Simple, inexpensive tree shelters or wire cages prevent antler rub and protect against browse until the tree matures.²²
  • How do you know it's time to remove the guard? As a rule of thumb, once a trunk passes about 4–6 inches in caliper and the bark gets thick and furrowed, rub impact generally drops off sharply. In practice that's generally 3–5 years for a fast grower and up to 8–10 years for something slow like an oak or beech.
• Rabbits and voles, in winter. They gnaw bark near the ground and under snow, and a complete ring of gnawing girdles the tree. Voles nest in mulch piled against a trunk — one more reason the donut has a hole in the middle.
• Squirrels. They strip patches of bark on branches and it looks alarming. It is rarely fatal, and squirrels plant a meaningful share of the next generation of oaks. Live with it.
• String trimmers. Not wildlife, but the same fix: a guard around the trunk ends the problem.

If you're planting on your own property

Species choice does much of the work. Rutgers Cooperative Extension maintains a rated list of landscape plants by deer resistance, developed with northern New Jersey nursery professionals and Master Gardeners.²⁴ And a densely layered planting is a deterrent in itself — deer prefer open sightlines and easy exits.²²

For the fuller picture — design strategies, fencing that doesn't injure wildlife, motion-activated deterrents, and what Montclair residents have actually found works — see the Montclair Wildlife Coalition's guide at montclairwildlifecoalition.org/youryard, and Montclair Animal Control's coexistence pages.²²²³

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Six

Hands off — but eyes on

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Some things are the Township's job. Yours is to notice and report.¹

• Stakes and ties. Stakes are temporary, and ties should be loose enough that the trunk can sway. If a tie is cutting into the bark, call Community Services.
• Trunk guards to prevent wildlife rub. If the town installed them, check each season — see section five above for when they can come off, and certainly before they constrict the trunk. Let the Township know when it's time to remove one.
  • If the Township has not installed a guard on a newly planted tree and you think one would help, ask whether you can add it yourself. That makes their job easier.
• Trunk wrap to protect in cold weather. Guidance genuinely differs — some programs recommend paper wrap on thin-barked young trees over winter against sunscald, removed each spring; others avoid wrap because it hides problems and holds moisture. Either way: never plastic, never tape, never year-round.
• Pruning. On a newly planted tree, pruning should be limited to dead or broken branches; structural training pruning starts after establishment.⁴ On a Township tree it isn't yours to do at all.¹ On private property, New Jersey law requires tree work by a Licensed Tree Expert or Licensed Tree Care Operator under the NJ Tree Experts and Tree Care Operators Licensing Act, N.J.S.A. 45:15C‑11 et seq.⁹
• Topping is not pruning. It disfigures the tree, invites decay, and costs more over the tree's life than proper care would have.⁸

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Seven

Know what you're looking at

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Watering and mulching are the same for every young street tree. Almost everything else depends on knowing the species — how big it will get, what it is likely to die of, and whether it should have been planted there at all. Species is also what lets you report a problem precisely, and what lets you check that the tree in the ground is the tree the permit promised.

Montclair's published list of species suitable for replacement planting names the large shade trees the Township wants — red, sugar, and Freeman maple; river birch; hickory; hackberry; beech; thornless honeylocust; Kentucky coffeetree; silverbell; black walnut; sweetgum; tulip poplar; black tupelo; London planetree and sycamore; shingle, swamp white, willow, and bur oak; linden; and DED-resistant American elm — plus medium trees including American hornbeam, yellowwood, magnolia, and hophornbeam. It explicitly prohibits four: flowering pear, ash, oaks in the red group, and Norway maple.¹⁸

Opposite leaves

• Maple — opposite, simple, lobed. Red maple: sharp narrow notches between lobes, whitish leaf underside, red buds and twigs. Sugar maple: rounder notches, lobe edges smooth rather than toothed. Norway maple: snap a leaf stalk — milky white sap is definitive. Common in older Montclair rows; prohibited for new planting as invasive.¹⁸
• Ash — opposite and compound, five to nine leaflets, diamond cross-hatched bark on older trunks. On a residential street, opposite-plus-compound is almost always ash. Roughly two thousand were lost townwide to the emerald ash borer; a living mature ash is either being treated or is next.¹⁸

Alternate and compound

• Thornless honeylocust — many small leaflets, feathery, light dappled shade; street cultivars usually thornless and podless.
• Kentucky coffeetree — an enormous doubly compound leaf, thick blunt twigs, leafs out very late and drops early. People assume it's dead in May. It isn't.
• Hickory, black walnut — fewer, larger leaflets; husked nuts underfoot in fall.

Alternate, simple, lobed

• Tulip poplar — four lobes and a flat, cut-off tip, like a cat's face in silhouette. Tall, straight, unmistakable once seen.
• Sweetgum — five-pointed star, spiky seed balls, corky ridges along the twigs.
• Oaks — rounded lobe tips means the white group (swamp white, bur, chestnut); bristle-tipped lobes means the red group (pin, red, scarlet), which Montclair now prohibits for new planting because of bacterial leaf scorch.¹⁸ Two oaks break the pattern: willow oak has narrow unlobed leaves, shingle oak plain glossy ovals. Both still make acorns.
• London planetree and sycamore — a maple-shaped lobed leaf, but alternate, and the giveaway is bark flaking into cream-and-olive camouflage. London plane usually carries seed balls in pairs; sycamore usually one at a time.

Alternate, simple, unlobed

• Hackberry — warty, corky bark like petrified bubble wrap; lopsided leaf base; small dark berries.
• Linden — heart-shaped leaf with an uneven base, and a papery strap-like bract dangling with the nutlets. Fragrant in June.
• Black tupelo — glossy oval leaves, stiff horizontal branches, and the first tree on the block to turn scarlet.
• Zelkova — vase-shaped like the elm it was planted to replace; serrated leaves; smooth gray bark flecked with orange.
• Callery pear — glossy near-round leaves, tight upright branching, early white flowers with an unpleasant smell. Invasive, prohibited for new planting, and notorious for splitting apart in storms.¹⁸
• Ginkgo — fan-shaped leaves, no possible confusion. Female trees drop foul fruit, which is why street plantings are male.

In winter

The opposite-versus-alternate test still works on bare twigs — buds are arranged the same way leaves are. Add bark, twig color, and whatever fruit is still hanging or lying underneath. Beech holds pale papery leaves through the winter; oaks often hold brown ones.

About the apps

Seek and iNaturalist will get you to the right genus from a phone photo most of the time, and the Arbor Day Foundation's What Tree Is That? walks a beginner through a real dichotomous key.¹⁹²⁰ But treat any single app answer as a hypothesis. They are confidently wrong on cultivars, and they routinely confuse look-alike pairs — sycamore and London plane, red maple and Freeman maple, the red-group oaks with one another. Confirm with two independent features before you write it down.

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And if you want more

Getting a tree — on your street, or on your property

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There are two doors here, and they are not the same door.

A street tree, in the right-of-way

• Request one in front of your home: call Community Services at 973‑509‑5711.¹
• Planting it yourself in the right-of-way requires Township permission, and the Township must approve the species.¹

A free native tree, through the Community Forestry Program

Montclair's Department of Sustainability runs a Community Forestry Program funded by a USDA Urban & Community Forestry grant. The Township describes its purpose as mitigating hotspots and reducing the urban heat island effect by expanding tree canopy, giving precedence to underserved communities — which means eligibility is tied to where the need is, not to who asks first.²¹

If your address is in an NJDEP-designated overburdened community, or in one of the low-canopy, high-heat parts of town, this is the program to ask about first — those are the addresses the grant was funded to serve. Eligibility and application details live on the program page and shift as grant cycles turn over, so check there rather than relying on this guide. Questions go to Dr. Lisa Johnson, Director of Sustainability — ljohnson@montclairnjusa.org, 973‑509‑5721.²¹

Planting on your own property

Where to put it, what to plant, and how to get it in the ground: see our Plant a Tree page.

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The point

Why one tree on one block matters

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Montclair's canopy has been shrinking. Sustainable Montclair's report The Vanishing Canopy — an independent analysis built on six years of Township tree records obtained under OPRA — documents net canopy loss year after year, against a baseline figure that dates to 2016 and has never been re-measured. Read it at sustainablemontclair.org/shadetreeordinance.

Canopy is not replaceable on any short timescale. A new two-inch tree delivers a small fraction of the shade, cooling, and stormwater interception of the thirty-inch tree it replaced, and closing that gap takes decades — but only if the young tree survives its establishment years. Most of what kills street trees in those years is preventable by a neighbor: drought stress, volcano mulch, mower damage, road salt.

There is also evidence that neighbors asking neighbors works better than paper does. A 2018 study in Arboriculture & Urban Forestry compared door-to-door tree care outreach against the identical materials simply left on the doorstep. Six weeks later, trees at the actively canvassed homes had measurably higher soil moisture, more mulch, and better-rated health.¹⁵

Knock on a door and split the summer. Two households alternating weeks is a watering plan a young tree can live on.

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Sustainable Montclair · sustainablemontclair@gmail.com Questions, corrections, or a block that needs trees? Get in touch.