
Pea-sized dark purple drupes ripen in September and October and hang into winter; birds strip most of them, but what falls stains concrete and gets tracked indoors, and the bird traffic itself becomes the complaint when the tree is over a parked car. On top of that the dense fine branching sheds constant small twig litter after every wind event, making hackberry a light-but-year-round cleanup tree rather than a two-weekends-in-November one.
About 40-60 ft tall with a 40-50 ft spread, and genuinely long-lived at roughly 150-200 years, well beyond most of what is planted around it. Removals land mid-bracket, and the cost driver is unusual for a tree this size: the wood is dense but it is the sheer brush volume from that twiggy wide crown that runs up chipping and hauling time.