Take a business named Goodwood Tree Care run by a tree surgeon with an environmental approach to his work and add a garden advice and design business run by a biologist and – writes Suzanne Kelsey – you have the combination to provide a soundly-based landscape service.

 Goodwood Tree Care is operated by International Society of Arboriculture member Russell Gooding and Oxford Brooke University biology graduate Debbie Bradford who trades as ‘Nature’s Keepers’.

Two years ago, they established their separate but complementary businesses in the village of Clanfield, near Faringdon, Oxfordshire. As well as employing a part-time assistant, Tony Pyle (landscape architecture student and shortly going on an arb course at Merrist Wood College), Russell uses the services of a couple of freelance tree surgeons – John Cox and Neil Portlock when several hands are needed. Two recent demands for this came in work on 30 crack willows - which needed pollarding – and poplars in a water meadow on the banks of the River Windrush just outside Burford and in the nearby village of Filkins where two large garden walnut trees needed pruning.  Also on site was a black poplar, a tree of particular interest to Russell and Debbie. The property owners became aware of its importance when they took part in a Daily Telegraph survey in the early 1990s. Congratulating them on boasting such a tree on their land, the paper commented: ‘Excellent news – a new female!’ This impressive and burred specimen needed no pollarding, just ‘tidying up’ but a group of grey poplars alongside it had not fared so well, one having been uprooted in high winds and another being badly decayed. The work here took a whole week. The property owner asked for the wood to be burnt but this proved impracticable so it was chipped. Debbie reckoned that the willows had been several hundreds of years old although the poplars were considerably younger. The two walnut trees would not normally have been reduced at this time of year but the district council work licence was about to expire. They were planted by the owner’s grandfather 60 years ago. It took Tony Pyle and John Cox half a day to thin and reshape them.

A recent Nature’s Keepers’ project was to advise a local parish council on a planting scheme. In redeveloping its recreation ground, it wanted to surround it with a wildlife-friendly hedge of native species. It is Debbie who carries out the tree surveys, reports and hazard assessment when either business is asked to quote for a job. ‘That’s because Russell hates paperwork’, she said. ‘He’d rather be up a tree’. Chatting to householders and landowners, she has the opportunity to talk to them about the environmental approach to any work they plan. If, for instance, a customer is having a leylandii hedge removed, she suggests replacing it with such species as hawthorn, blackthorn, spindleberry, dog rose and the wayfaring tree. ‘All the things you find included in a natural hedge’, she said. ‘They are beautiful, the flowers last all summer and they also bring in the bees’. She finds that owners are becoming much more environmentally aware. ‘Almost everybody that we see is interested in these issues’. Russell added: ‘There are things that we won’t do’.

One of the requests that they aim to avoid is spraying to kill the roots of a felled tree when stump-grinding was the much better option. ‘There are sprays that we won’t supply’, Debbie said. ‘There is one less harmful one that we will use if there is difficulty of access for a stump-grinder but we avoid sprays like the plague’. The same applied to pest-control sprays. ‘We try to prune bugs out’, she aid, ‘or spray with an organic treatment’. Where insect pests are concerns, she prefers the control of aphids and blackfly to be their natural predators. Russell shares this concern for nature and the environment. He recalls an occasion when a job had to stop because bats were inside a hollow tree and the work came to a very swift halt. Tree work was not Russell’s immediate career ambition.

On leaving school, he undertook a five-year engineering apprenticeship but then decided that he didn’t really like working indoors. His stepfather was a woodsman and this was a big influence in his alternative career choice. That was 15 years ago at the time of the big storm which afflicted woodlands throughout southern England. He recalls on early job in which he was involved, at the historic Waylands Smith on the Ridgeway which runs across the Berkshire Downs. He was by then on an arb apprenticeship but also freelancing to gain experience. Some of the people with whom he was working were asked by English Heritage to clear up after the storm devastation. They had to deal with some 60 tons of fallen beechwood and it took a large team a week to clear it and to find somewhere to take the wood as all the sawmills were still full with storm aftermath work. Further experience Russell gained was while working in locations abroad. ‘Some of the work I did in Berlin was fantastic’, he said. ‘It was fascinating to be in East Germany at the time that the Berlin Wall came down.

I was working in a cemetery in Potsdam with five other tree surgeons. ‘There were fantastic mature English oaks there and big elms. Our help was needed as the local workers did not have the experience for that type of work’, he said. ‘These elms survived when most of the British ones did not because of the winter temperatures experienced there. They can go down to minus-30o so they beetles which spread the disease did not survive’. Russell looks to global warming as a reason for the the spread of such diseases. ‘We are not getting the frosts as we used to and they are not killing off the insects. There, the temperature really drops with even the river frozen’, he said. After a spell back home, freelancing for the Norcot timber business and its tree survey operations around Reading, Russell was off abroad again for a short spell, working with the same team as in Berlin. Destination: Amman, to work at the royal palace for the wife of King Hussein of Jordan.

Work hazards were different from those encountered in this country: snakes under stones and the need to take care when working around the roots of a tree so as not to disturb slumbering tortoises. Much of the work was among pines, the forests of which were in need of much attention. Back home again, Russell decided that it was time to set up his own tree-surgery business. Both Goodwood and Nature’s Keepers are happy to work wherever a customer calls from with the emphasis on the Oxford, Reading and London areas. Potential customers can learn about them and their ideals from the ten pages of their website. ‘We learn something new all the time’, Debbie says. ‘It is only by doing that you learn. With plants, we learn by experimenting’.