Best Trees to Plant on the North Shore (and What to Avoid)

Most of the tree-planting advice online is written for the whole country, which makes it nearly useless here. The North Shore has a specific set of site conditions - heavy clay, often alkaline soil, humid summers, a salt load along every street, and a canopy already overloaded with a few species - and the species list that works follows from those conditions.

This is also the most consequential decision on a removal job. The tree you plant now is the tree somebody decides about in 2075.

The one rule that matters more than the species list

Diversify. The reason the North Shore has lost its canopy twice in living memory is monoculture. Streets were planted almost entirely in American elm, and Dutch elm disease took them. Elms were replaced largely with ash, and the emerald ash borer took those - see why dead ash cannot wait. The towns that are now planting one new species everywhere are setting up the third round.

The practical version for a homeowner: do not replace a tree with the same species you just lost, and if you are planting three trees, plant three different species. A row of eight identical arborvitae or eight identical spruce is a single point of failure, which is exactly the lesson of the dying blue spruce.

Large shade trees - the long game

These need real space, 30 feet or more from the house and well clear of overhead wires, and they are what actually shades a property in thirty years.

Bur oak. The best large tree you can plant here. Native, extremely tolerant of clay, drought, and salt, and genuinely long-lived - centuries. In the white oak group, which means it is more resistant to oak wilt than the red oaks. Slower than people want, which is why it gets passed over. Plant it anyway.

Swamp white oak. Nearly as good and faster, and the right choice for a site that holds water. Handles the wet clay that kills most oaks.

Hackberry. Underrated and tough as nails. Tolerates clay, alkaline soil, salt, drought, and urban abuse. Not a glamour tree, and nipple gall on the leaves is cosmetic and harmless.

Kentucky coffeetree. Interesting form, excellent toughness, late to leaf out. Plant a male cultivar if you do not want the pods.

Northern catalpa, London planetree, and ginkgo all work on tough sites, with ginkgo being close to indestructible. Ginkgo should be a male cultivar - the female fruit smells genuinely awful.

Honey locust. Already very common, which is the main argument against planting more. But it is tolerant of salt, clay, and compaction, and it casts a light dappled shade that lawn will grow under. Thornless, seedless cultivars only.

Medium trees - the practical choice for most lots

For a typical North Shore lot, something maturing at 30 to 50 feet is often the right call.

American hornbeam and hophornbeam. Both native, both handle shade, both excellent small-to-medium understory trees.

Serviceberry. Spring flower, good fall color, edible fruit, native. Works as a multi-stem or single-stem.

Japanese tree lilac. Tough, blooms in June when nothing else does, tolerates street conditions. One of the best choices for a parkway with wires overhead.

Hornbeam cultivars for narrow upright form where you have no horizontal room.

Under power lines

This is the single most common planting mistake here, and it is permanent. Anything that matures over about 25 feet, planted under a distribution line, is a scheduled conflict - and the resolution is utility clearance pruning, which will reshape your tree around the wire. See trees near power lines.

Under wires, plant only: serviceberry, crabapple (a disease-resistant cultivar), hawthorn (thornless), redbud, Japanese tree lilac, or American hornbeam.

Check the mature height on the tag, not the height in the pot.

Screening, without repeating the spruce mistake

Screening is where people get hurt most, because the usual answer - a straight row of one species - is the answer that fails.

Do not plant Colorado blue spruce. It is unsuited to our humidity and the needle cast and canker story plays out on a 20-to-25-year clock. Why blue spruce are dying across the North Shore is the detail.

Better:

• Norway spruce. Handles our humidity far better than Colorado blue, grows fast, gets large. The default replacement.
• Arborvitae where there is no deer pressure. Where there is, deer will strip it to 6 feet in one winter - and deer pressure is real in Lake Forest, Long Grove, Mettawa, and Bannockburn.
• American holly or a mixed deciduous-evergreen screen. Less uniform, far more durable.
• Space them wider than feels right. The row that never dries out internally is the row that gets needle cast. Give them room for air to move.
• Stagger two rows of mixed species rather than one straight row of one species. Losing one tree then leaves a gap, not a hole.

What not to plant, and why

• Bradford and callery pear. Fails structurally in ice storms as a category, and invasive. Do not plant it.
• Silver maple. Fast, weak-wooded, aggressive surface roots into sewers and walks. This is the tree in half the root problem and storm damage calls here.
• Norway maple. Invasive, shallow dense roots that nothing grows under, prone to girdling roots and verticillium - see common maple problems.
• Any ash. The borer is endemic. Planting ash now means buying a treatment subscription.
• Box elder, Siberian elm, tree of heaven, mulberry, buckthorn. Weed trees. Buckthorn you will be removing, not planting, but it arrives on its own.
• Willow and cottonwood anywhere near a sewer lateral or a foundation.
• Sugar maple on a street edge. A beautiful tree, genuinely salt-sensitive, and the street is where the salt is. See road salt and tree damage. Plant it in the back yard instead.
• Birch in a hot dry front lawn. River birch handles our conditions; white-barked birches generally struggle and bend to the ground under snow and ice.

Planting it so it survives

The species choice gets most of the credit and the planting technique gets most of the failures. Four things decide whether the tree is alive in five years:

Do not plant it too deep. The root flare - where the trunk widens into the roots - must be visible at or slightly above finished grade. Planting deep is the most common cause of young tree death here, and in clay it is lethal. Dig wide, not deep.

Cut the circling roots. Container-grown trees come with roots spiraling the pot. Those become girdling roots that strangle the tree at 20 years. Shave or cut them at planting. On balled-and-burlapped stock, remove the wire basket, the burlap, and all the twine from the top of the ball.

Mulch like a donut, not a volcano. Two to three inches of wood chips over the root zone, pulled back several inches from the trunk. Mulch against bark holds moisture against it and rots it.

Water it for two full years. Roughly 10 to 15 gallons a week through the growing season, applied slowly, straight to the root ball. Not the lawn sprinkler. Most new trees that die, die of drought in year one or two, and the owner thinks they got a bad tree.

Stake only if the site is genuinely windy or the tree will not stand, and remove the stakes after one year. Forgotten staking straps girdle trunks.

Plant in fall or early spring. Fall planting, roughly September into early November, gives roots a season to establish before summer heat. Avoid planting in July.

The short version

1. Diversify. Do not replace like with like, and never plant a single-species row.
2. Bur oak, swamp white oak, hackberry, Kentucky coffeetree are the best big trees for our clay.
3. Under wires: nothing over 25 feet mature. Check the tag.
4. Norway spruce, not Colorado blue, for screening - spaced wide and mixed.
5. Never: Bradford pear, silver maple, Norway maple, ash.
6. Root flare visible, circling roots cut, mulch donut, water for two years.

If you are taking a tree out in Winnetka, Glenview, Northbrook, Highland Park, or Deerfield and want the replacement conversation to be part of it, that is a reasonable thing to ask for on the quote. Request a free on-site estimate, or book an arborist consultation if the site is complicated enough to be worth planning properly.