The plan: 1,800 trees on the devil strips
In February 2025 Mayor Shammas Malik announced that the city would plant about 1,800 new trees that year. They were to go on tree lawns, the strips of grass between sidewalk and curb that Akron calls devil strips. The budget was $750,000.
City workers planted 908 of them from March through May. The remaining 900 or so were scheduled for November, with planting allowed to run into mid-December if the weather held. The first neighborhoods in line were on the south and southwest sides, where tree cover was thinnest.
A separate effort called Project ACORN added 258 more in East Akron, Middlebury, Sherbondy Hill, South Akron and Summit Lake, paid for by a U.S. Forest Service grant. Together the two programs put more than 2,000 new trees in the ground in a single year.
Why the city is planting
Akron's own canopy report, done in 2020, found that trees shaded 34.85 percent of the city. It also projected that figure would slip to about 30 percent by 2040. The city loses roughly 6,540 trees a year.
There is a catch. A council member said at the time that the city controls only about 9 percent of the trees inside its limits. The rest stand on private land. Street trees are the part the city can do by itself.
The three species it chose are all native: northern red oak, sugar maple and serviceberry. Each one behaves differently over a roof.
Northern red oak
For an oak, the northern red grows quickly, and it becomes a very large tree. It sheds three things.
- Tassels in spring. As the leaves open, the tree drops its spent flowers, which are thin, stringy catkins.
- Acorns in early fall. A red oak needs a couple of decades before it bears, and each acorn takes two summers to ripen.
- Leaves, late. Red oak leaves are big and leathery, with pointed lobes. They drop from October into November. Young oaks often hang on to some dead leaves all winter and let go of them in spring.
In a gutter the tassels are the sneaky part. They are fine enough to slip past a coarse screen and they mat over a downspout outlet. The leaves are tough and slow to rot, so a clump of them stays a clump.
Sugar maple
The sugar maple keeps a different calendar from the maples many people know.
Silver and red maples release their winged seeds in late spring. The sugar maple holds its seeds through the summer and lets them spin down in early fall, just ahead of the leaves. The leaves follow in a rush, usually over two or three weeks in October.
Maple leaves are thin. Wet, they flatten into a layer that sheds water like a tarp, and within weeks they break down into a dark sludge. The seeds come in joined pairs. Each wing dries and crumbles into flakes small enough to pass through punched or molded openings.
Serviceberry
Serviceberry is the small one. It stays a small tree, usually between 15 and 25 feet tall, which makes it a sensible choice for a narrow devil strip.
It blooms white in April, sets purple berries in June, and turns orange in fall. Its leaves are little and few. Over a porch roof or a one-story eave it can drop petals and berry skins, but it is rarely big enough to trouble the main gutter of a two-story house.
A sapling is not your problem yet
A newly planted street tree is about as tall as a basketball hoop. It will be many years before it reaches over a roofline, and an oak takes longer still to make acorns.
The trees filling Akron gutters this fall were planted two or three generations ago. What the 2025 list tells you is that the city's canopy will go on being oak and maple. The mix of debris you clean out today is the mix the next owner of your house will clean out too.
What stops all of it
Sort that debris by size. Whole leaves are large, and any guard keeps them out. Oak tassels, maple seed flakes and the grit that washes off shingles are small. Those are what get through the cheaper guard types and build up underneath.
A stainless micro-mesh has openings too fine for any of them. They sit on top, dry, and blow or wash away. The page that sets micro-mesh against other gutter guards goes through screens, foam, brushes and perforated panels one at a time and says where each one gives up.
Mesh is not maintenance-free under these trees. Pollen and fluff can film the surface in spring, and a hose rinse clears it.
If you want a street tree, or are getting one
Residents can ask for a street tree by calling 311, or through the Akron311 app. When the city plans to plant on a particular tree lawn, the owner gets a flyer in the mail first.
A tree on the devil strip is good for the street and, in time, hard on the gutter behind it. If you are weighing that up for a house in Akron, start with the comparison of gutter guard types, then look at how gutter guard pricing works.