Strimming and overgrowth clearance in Dawlish

The town sits in a narrow valley in red sandstone cliffs, and a good many gardens climb the sides of it in terraces held by retaining walls. Terraced ground is slow to clear: every level is worked separately, everything cut has to come down rather than across, and there is usually a set of steps involved.

None of that is a problem, but it is time, and it is the single biggest reason an estimate for a Dawlish garden is longer than one for the same area of flat ground in Exeter. Say how many levels there are when you send the photographs.

The post-war bungalow development on the cliff tops sits in open, exposed ground that takes unbroken wind off the sea. Growth up there is coarse and low rather than tall, and the plots are generally flat, fenced and easy to work, with somewhere obvious to park.

These are good half day jobs, often two or three neighbouring plots on the same morning, and the arisings load out easily because a trailer can get within a few metres of the back gate on most of them.

The brook running through the middle of the town keeps the ground beside it damp all year, and gardens backing onto it grow accordingly. Nettle, bramble and self set willow along a watercourse are the usual find, and the strip nearest the water is always the heaviest part of the job.

Material cut beside a watercourse is best taken away rather than stacked where the next high water can move it, which is one of the few cases where removal is the obvious answer rather than a choice.

Dawlish takes some of the most storm exposed weather on the south Devon coast, with sea water thrown over the wall in a south easterly. Salt burn on the seaward side keeps some growth down, and the sheltered pockets behind walls and buildings get away instead.

The practical result is that clearance here is rarely uniform across a plot. One corner is bare and hard, another is over head height, and the estimate has to account for both.

Out at the Warren the ground changes completely: sand, marram, sea buckthorn and rough dune grass, with modern estates inland behind it. Sandy plots dry fast and cut easily, and they are workable soon after rain when the valley gardens in the town are not.

Sea buckthorn is the one to flag. It is woody, thorny and spreads by suckering, so cutting it back is a blade job and it will be back, which is worth knowing before the money is spent.

Between the cliff top estates, the valley terraces and the Warren there are three quite different jobs inside one town, so an estimate here always asks which part of Dawlish a property sits in before it talks about hours.