Tree Planting Service in Heathfield

Most of the planting we are asked to do around Heathfield involves boundaries rather than one tree on a lawn. This is farmed country with a long history of hedged fields, so the jobs that come in tend to be gapping up a hedge that has thinned, replanting a line that was grubbed out years ago, or getting shelter onto a bare field edge.

Ridge Ground and Valley Clay

Heathfield sits high, at around 150 metres, and the bedrock underneath it is mapped by the British Geological Survey as the Ashdown Formation, a mix of sandstone, siltstone and mudstone. Head south towards Horam and the ground falls away to roughly half that height, with Wadhurst Clay coming in alongside the Ashdown Formation, a mudstone the survey describes as soft and dark grey.

That is the reason a field at the top of your land and a field at the bottom can behave like two different farms. The high ground drains freely and dries out hard in a long summer. The low ground holds water all winter, and a pit dug in February can still have standing water in it an hour later. Alder, English oak, hornbeam and field maple will take wet feet. A pine put in the same hole will rot off at the roots.

Gapping Up an Old Hedge

A Wealden hedge that has been cut tight for decades often has gaps at the base where the old stools have given out. Filling those is skilled work, not a matter of pushing whips into the holes. The new plants are competing with established roots for water, so the ground has to be opened properly and the competition cut back, or the gaps are still there in three years.

Boundaries Along the Old Cuckoo Line

The Cuckoo Trail finishes at Heathfield, so plenty of gardens and field edges around the town back onto it. It is the eleven mile route between Polegate and Heathfield following the old Cuckoo Line railway, opened in 1880 and now a walking and cycling path.

Planting on a boundary like that needs a little thought about what the tree will be in twenty years rather than what it is on the day it goes in. A line of fast, wide species planted tight to the edge of a shared path becomes somebody’s pruning problem later. We set them back, space them for their mature spread, and pick stock that can be managed from your side of the boundary.

Garden Trees in the Town and the Villages

Not all of our tree and hedge planting here goes into a field. Plenty of it is one tree in a garden in Heathfield, Cross in Hand, Punnetts Town, Waldron or Broad Oak, usually replacing something that got too big for where it was.

The mistake we are most often called in to undo is a tree planted too close to a house because it looked small in the pot. We will tell you what the mature spread is likely to be and where the tree needs to sit to get there without causing you a problem. If the old stump is still in the ground we grind it out, bring in topsoil to make up the level, and plant into prepared ground rather than into a bed of chippings.