Tree surgery and landscaping in Hythe and the Waterside

The Waterside is the strip between Southampton Water and the New Forest: Marchwood, Hythe, Dibden and Dibden Purlieu, then Fawley, Holbury, Blackfield and Calshot down towards the Solent. It faces the city across the water, and the ferry from Hythe Pier is the quick way over on foot, but with a van full of kit we come round by Totton and the A326, which puts us there in about twenty-five minutes.

The ground changes as soon as you cross from Southampton. Much of the Waterside is on the sandy, fast-draining soils of the Forest edge, with pine, birch and rhododendron rather than the oak and clay of the city side. Lawns dry out faster, new planting needs more organic matter worked in to hold water, and the big conifers that were planted as screens in the sixties and seventies are now the trees we are most often asked to reduce or take out.

On the western edge the gardens back straight onto the National Park. Forest ponies, cattle and donkeys roam free out there and will walk into any garden that lets them, so a boundary on the Forest side has to be stock-proof as well as tidy, and the protections on trees and land follow the same rules we work to across the Forest.