Tree surgeons in St Ives, Carbis Bay and Lelant

The thing everyone notices about Carbis Bay and the road into St Ives is the Monterey pines. Planted by the Victorians who built the villas along the cliff, they are now enormous, dark, wind shaped trees leaning over the railway, the coast path and the hotels, and they are the reason the bay looks the way it does. They are also the trees we are most often called about. Monterey pine is fast, brittle and heavy, sheds big limbs without much warning, and rots at the base as it ages. Dead wooding and reducing the sail of a pine before it fails is far cheaper than the alternative, and where one has to come out it is nearly always a crane job, with sections lifted straight over the villa to the road.

Behind the harbour the old fishing town is a maze of granite cottages with no gardens at all, and above it the Victorian and Edwardian town climbs the hill in terraces: Tregenna, Talland, Belyars, the streets up to the Leach Pottery. Gardens are steep, small and reached through the house or up a flight of granite steps, and the trees in them, sycamores, evergreen oaks, escallonia and fuchsia grown huge in the mild air, have to be dismantled into pieces small enough to carry. Parking is the other problem; in summer it is nearly impossible, so we do the town's tree work in the quiet months where we can, and plan the vehicles carefully when we cannot.

A large share of the houses in St Ives and Carbis Bay are holiday lets or second homes whose owners are not in Cornwall. We are used to working with managing agents: quoting from a visit with the agent's key, sending photographs of the tree and of the work when it is done, and fitting the job into a changeover gap or the off season. The free tree health check is a sensible thing for an agent to ask for on a property with big trees, because a limb through a guest's car is a bad week for everyone.

Round the point at Lelant the ground drops to the Hayle estuary, and the trees change: pines and sycamores on the dunes around the golf course and the church, willow and alder along the tidal creek, and the mature gardens of the older houses along the Saltings. The estuary is a protected bird site, and work along its edge is timed for the birds and checked with the relevant bodies where it needs to be.

St Ives faces north, which is unusual on this coast, and it gets the northerly and north westerly gales that the south coast is spared. Trees along the Island, the Porthmeor side and the cliff at Carbis Bay are shaped by it and fail in it. After a northerly blow the calls come from here rather than from Falmouth. We group St Ives work and are honest about travel in the quote; for the big pines the crane and lorry make the journey well worthwhile.