Estates, semis and the trees that came with them
Most of Camborne's housing is twentieth century: the council built semis at Pengegon and Tuckingmill, the estates that spread out towards Troon, Beacon and Barripper after the war, and the newer housing on the old industrial land around the retail park and towards Pool. The trees are the ones planted with the houses, sixty or seventy years ago, and a great many are now the wrong size for the plot: flowering cherries lifting the paths, whitebeams and rowans over the drives, poplars planted as screens along the estate edges and now thirty metres tall, and leylandii hedges that stopped being hedges a long time ago. Reducing what can be reduced and removing what cannot, with the stumps ground so the ground can be used again, is the bread and butter of our Camborne work.
The old town and its parks
Camborne's Victorian centre, around Commercial Street, the Wesley chapel and the School of Mines building, has the terraces and tight back gardens you would expect of a mining town, and a conservation area over the middle of it. Around the edges are the mature trees of the parks and the bigger houses: the limes and beeches around Rosewarne, the trees of the recreation ground and of the old Holman family properties, and the belts of beech along the roads towards Tehidy. These are large, old and well loved, and the work on them is careful reduction and dead wooding rather than removal, with the council's tree officer consulted where a preservation order applies.
Tehidy, the Red River and the north coast edge
North of the town the ground drops through Tehidy Country Park to Portreath and the coast. Tehidy is the largest wood in west Cornwall, mostly beech and pine planted by the Bassets, and the houses around its edge at Tehidy, Illogan and Coombe live under some very large trees. Storm damage here is heavy in a bad winter and we have lifted a good many windblown beech root plates out of gardens along that edge. The Red River valley below Tuckingmill is the opposite: willow, alder and self sown sycamore on old tin streaming ground, wet and soft, where the trees blow over rather than break and the digger has to work off mats.
Troon, Beacon and the high ground
South of the town the villages of Troon, Beacon, Bolenowe and Carnkie climb towards Carn Brea and the moor at Carnmenellis, and the wind up there shapes everything. Trees are few and lean hard to the north east, hedges are gorse and thorn on granite banks, and the odd shelter belt of Monterey pine or sycamore planted around a farm is now a line of enormous, one sided trees that fail one at a time. Reducing the sail of those belts before they fail, clearing the ones that have, and keeping the hedge banks in order for the farms is winter work we know well.
Access and quoting
Camborne's estates are easy for the lorry and the crane, and a crane removal over a semi from the road or the drive is often the quickest and cheapest way to deal with an overgrown estate tree. The old town and the hill villages need more thought about vehicles. Every job is looked at first, and the free tree health check covers all of TR14.