Canton, OH Street Trees: When Each One Drops in Your Gutters

Ask a Canton homeowner when the gutters fill and the answer is usually October. That is only the loudest month. Something comes off the trees over this city in nearly every month of the year, and the small stuff that falls in spring does more harm to a gutter than the big leaves of fall. This calendar goes tree by tree.

Which trees line Canton streets?

Maples, more than anything else. The city's own staff have said that earlier street plantings included a great many maples, and that the roots went on to heave sidewalks. Since hiring an urban forester about a decade ago, Canton has been choosing species with more care, looking at mature height and at the utilities above and below each planting spot. But the trees already standing over older roofs are the ones that matter for gutters, and on older streets across Northeast Ohio those are typically big maples, along with oaks, honeylocust, sycamore and the odd spruce.

Canopy is not even across the city. Mapping done for the city's tree program shows the least cover near downtown and the former industrial districts and the most toward the township edges. The leafy belt runs through the older residential streets, which is where gutters work hardest.

What falls in each month?

Timing shifts a week or two with the weather. In a typical Stark County year it runs like this.

Why are maple seeds worse than maple leaves?

A leaf is big, light and flat. It bridges across a gutter, dries and often blows back out. A maple seed is a small heavy nut on a wing. It drops into the trough point first, the wing rots away, and the nut washes toward the downspout with all the others. Silver maples release theirs in May, in the same weeks as the heaviest spring rain. A gutter can go from clear to blocked in ten days, and nobody is looking because it is not fall.

Seeds are also the test that separates guard types. They fit neatly into the slots of a plastic screen and stand there like darts. Fine stainless mesh has no opening big enough to take one. That difference is the heart of the comparison between micro-mesh and other gutter guards.

What do oaks do differently?

Oaks work on a later clock. Their pollen tassels fall in May, thin brown strings that mat together when wet and slide into downspouts as a plug. Acorns follow in early fall. Then the leaves come late. Many oaks hang on to dead brown leaves through the first snows and let them go a handful at a time all winter. A house under a large oak can be cleaned in mid November and have full gutters again by January.

Do evergreens count?

Yes. Spruce and pine drop their oldest needles every fall and a few more in every wind. Needles are thin enough to pass through punched and slotted guards and stiff enough to jam in them. The city has planted Norway spruce as a screen at the Route 62 and Market Avenue ramps, and the same species stands along plenty of back lot lines as a windbreak. If one overhangs your roof, your gutters have no off season.

What about honeylocust and sycamore?

Honeylocust is a popular street tree because its shade is light. Its leaflets are the size of a fingernail. They come down early, they do not bridge, and they settle into a dense paste. Sycamores are the opposite: leaves as big as a dinner plate that fall late, along with strips of bark and seed balls that break apart into fluff.

So when should Canton gutters be cleaned?

Without guards, a house under mature trees needs at least two cleanings: one in early June after the seeds and tassels, and one in late November after the last maples have dropped. Under oaks, a third in late winter is common. That is three trips up a ladder, or three paid visits, every year.

With a micro-mesh guard, the calendar shrinks to a look at the mesh after the seed drop and a rinse if it needs one. Nothing has to be scooped. If you are weighing the two, the page comparing guard types is the place to start, and the Canton area pages describe the tree cover in four neighborhoods.