Crown reduction, thinning & surgery

Safe, reliable tree surgery

RSK Countryside Management’s fully qualified and experienced tree surgeons will undertake all tree surgery with minimal disruptions, approaching the tree to deliver aesthetic value or safety-critical pruning or felling to protect third-party structures. We ensure full health and safety and environmental assessments are completed before starting any tree surgery work, following all relevant risk and method statements. Our teams are qualified climbers, working in accordance with the working-at-height hierarchy, deploying MEWPs where appropriate.

Our proactive tree management plans help landowners to fulfil their duty of care. By using our managed programme of works, we can save you from having to pay excessively for reactive call-outs. A healthy-looking tree can still be diseased from the inside, and its collapse could cause property damage, life changing injuries or death.

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Common tree surgery tasks

Our experienced teams can fell trees in open areas or while working within confined spaces with buildings nearby safely to meet your needs. RSK Countryside Management’s tree surgeons will always undertake a comprehensive risk assessment to minimise the likelihood of risk, damage or harm and will ensure clients are aware of any potential dangers.

To help protect Britain’s forests, a felling licence from the Forestry Commission can be required to fell many trees. It is illegal to fell trees without a licence if an exemption does not apply. More commonly, trees have Tree Preservation Orders (TPO) or are within conservation areas. We can check both points with the local planning authority and obtain the relevant approval if required

Some trees require a crown reduction to manage the weight of the leaf or to reduce the impact of the canopy (e.g. shading). This means the reduction of the complete outline dimension of the canopy of the tree, from tips of limbs and branches towards the main trunk. Crown reductions can depend on the species of tree and typically not more than 20% should be reduced at any one time.

The removal of a proportion of the small secondary live woody growth (in addition to weak, damaged, dead, crossing or duplicated branches and soft growth) to reduce the leaf area of the canopy.

The removal of all soft growth and branches or parts thereof, within defined limits. Crown lifting may result in the canopy base not being at one single level but stepped to allow for different clearances, for example where a tree overhangs both a footway and a road, as different height clearances are required.

When trees are felled or fall, their stumps can be removed to enable further groundworks. A stump grinder or stump cutter removes tree stumps by means of a rotating cutting disk that chips away the wood to approximately 6-12’’ below ground level.

A veteran tree can be defined as: “a tree that is of interest biologically, culturally or aesthetically because of its age, size or condition”. We can advise and prepare a management plan for ancient trees and woodland.

Visit the Natural England website for more information on best practice guidelines on managing veteran trees.

Veteran trees best practice