"kay" wrote in message
...

Does anyone have first-hand experience of gardening in a Conservation
Area?

I have been discussing with the Council tree person the impact of their
proposal to extend the Conservation Area to include our house and
garden.

Very briefly:

All trees with a trunk of 3 inches dia or more at about 5ft high are
covered, and for any work on them, I need to give six weeks notice, and
fill in a form with a plan showing the trees' location and full details
of the work I need to do.

This covers all work, including, eg annual pruning of fruit trees. He
has told me that picking of bay leaves for culinary purposes, and
picking holly for christmas decorations should, by law, be applied for
similarly but will be overlooked.

I will have to apply every single year to carry out annual pruning - I
cannot get an approval to annually prune.

There appears to be no way in which to get a particular tree exempted -
eg for them to decide that a leylandii doesn't add to the conservation
character of the area and therefore I may continue to cut it back to
keep it within bounds.

Since I have around 40 trees over the size limit, are close to reaching
it, this is going to cause me a considerable amount of paperwork, and,
more importantly, it will cause them a lot of paperwork (I think he was
very sensible to concede on bay leaves ;-) )

So - is this the attitude tree officers are taking elsewhere, or is my
particular tree officer not quite au fait with the legislation (my
father believes that there is something in the primary legislation
saying that it shouldn't override good husbandry, and so annual pruning
of fruit trees is allowed)?


--
kay

Kay, I live and garden inside a conservation zone, and although in theory
much of what you have said is correct (you can actually cut hedges, maintain
topiary, prune fruit trees, pleach trees etc all without hindrance) in
practice no one has ever shown the slightest interest in what happens here,
last year I took down 4 large sycamores each with a trunk diameter of over
18", they were in the boundary hedge and had anyone whinged I would have
shown them the old pictures when they were just a hedge. I have two other
sycamores that are also in the boundary hedge but these are over 250 years
old and have never been cut, these I would not consider touching as they are
trees that everyone in the village gets to see and although it would be
nicer if they were not sycamore they are worth conserving so I do.

Mind you every time I put a ladder up to do any house maintenance (we are
not a listed building) someone will always stick their oar in and ask what I
am doing! they seem to have got the idea that they can control the colour of
the house, I wouldn't mind but we painted it this colour in the first place
but it seems our taste was so good it must be preserved for ever!!