Tree surgeons in Truro, ten minutes from our yard

Truro grew rich in the nineteenth century and planted accordingly. The villas along Falmouth Road, Lemon Street, Kenwyn and up towards Treyew Road came with beeches, limes, horse chestnuts, cedars and the occasional monkey puzzle, and a hundred and fifty years later those trees are enormous, mature and standing in gardens that have since been divided, built on and turned into car parks. A great deal of our Truro work is on exactly this kind of tree: a beech whose canopy spread has become out of proportion for its setting, a lime dropping honeydew on the cars beneath it, a cedar with a limb over the neighbour's roof.

The beech in Kenwyn on our pruning page is typical. The owners did not want it gone, and it did not need to be. A selective 2 m reduction with every cut under 75 mm, and a crown lift to put light back on the lawn, kept a lovely middle aged tree in proportion for another decade. That is the conversation we would rather have in Truro than the one about felling.

Much of central Truro, including Lemon Street, the cathedral quarter and the older parts of Kenwyn, is a conservation area, and a large number of the city's trees are covered by Tree Preservation Orders. Cornwall Council's offices are in the city, and its tree officers know these streets well. Before any work in Truro we check the council's map, and where the tree is protected we make the application or serve the six week notice before a saw comes out. We describe the work in the terms the council expects, and the beech reduction above is the sort of specification that gets approved because it is measured and justified.

Truro's older streets were laid out for horses. Terraced gardens behind Ferris Town, the lanes off Kenwyn Road, the steep plots above Malpas Road: many have no rear access at all, and a big tree in one of them is a rigging job, dismantled in small pieces and carried out through the house or over the wall. Where we can get one of our cranes onto the street, the job changes completely, with sections lifted straight over the house to the lorry and a day's work instead of three. A crane in a Truro street usually needs a parking suspension or a lane closure from the council, which we arrange and give the neighbours notice of.

The newer estates at Threemilestone, Gloweth, Highertown and out towards Shortlanesend are easier: drives to stand on, and trees that are mostly the fast growing species planted when the estates were built and now getting too large for the plots.

Truro sits where the Kenwyn and the Allen meet and become the Truro River, and the ground along them at Boscawen Park, Malpas, Sunny Corner and Newham is wet, soft and lined with willow, alder and poplar. These are fast growing, weak wooded trees that shed limbs in wind and blow over when the ground is saturated, and after a wet winter we get a run of calls from the creek side houses. The wet ground also limits what machinery we can use; the digger goes on mats, and some jobs wait for a dry spell.

Down the river at Malpas and St Clement the oak woods on the creek banks are among the best in the county, and the storm damage there last winter was heavy. Much of it can be left for wildlife; the trees over the lanes and gardens could not be.

Because we are so close, we look at every Truro job in person before pricing it. We check the tree, the access, what is beneath it and whether a crane can reach, and we check the protected tree map. The quote says what will be done, how, and what happens to the timber. The free tree health check applies across the city, so if you are simply worried about a tree, that is where to start.