Ensuring our local community are engaged in our woodland regeneration, biodiversity and maintenance work

At Chiswick House and Gardens Trust, we passionately believe that our gardens are for everyone, every day – and a core part of this means making sure that local Chiswick residents, visitors and community members feel informed about our choices. 

Long-term garden maintenance isn’t always straightforward. Our ‘Letting the light in’ project has involved the clearing of relatively large areas of foliage and the removal of some invasive and/or overgrown plants and shrubs, leading to a temporarily bare appearance in parts of our woodland areas. Self-sown and diseased or damaged trees have also been removed. This work prioritises the health of our older trees and the habitats they support while allowing younger, diverse trees to thrive, and grow uninhibited.  

Over the medium to long-term, clearing work will yield huge benefits for our on-site wildlife, and for our loyal visitors and community – but making sure that all those who use and love the gardens are not shocked by these changes, and understand our approach, is vital. 

Walks, talks and more 

Across 2024 we’ve made the effort to actively engage with our visitors. In April we held a Town Hall meeting, open to all, during which nearby residents and the wider Hounslow community were invited to join us in a discussion about some of our plans for the future, including our tree maintenance and strategies for managing and felling diseased trees, and longer-term woodland regeneration work.  

Guided woodland walks, open to both our valued Members and to the general public, have been a key part of our 2024 engagement activity. During them, participants were able to explore beautiful autumn woodland with an experienced gardens’ team member, learning about the unique trees, plants and wildlife that make our ground so special, but also got to find out about the Letting the light in work, what it’s for, and why it matters. 

If you didn’t manage to join one this year, please do keep an eye out for more 2025 dates (you can sign up to our monthly newsletter to hear about these in advance too). 

Managing pollarding and its impact on locals 

Back in September, we carried out essential pollarding work on the lime trees in Duke’s Avenue. Doing this is important for public safety – pollarding reduces the risk of falling branches by cutting back the main branches of a tree to short stubs where joints, or ‘knuckles’, have begun to weaken –  and also encourages stronger, healthier, juvenile growth, reducing the risk of disease. 

Throughout this process, we worked directly with people living along this road and nearby, consulting with them and listening to their safety concerns, taking on board the need to pollard over a regular timeframe, and liaising with them to ensure that disruption was kept to a minimum. Understanding its importance, and its direct benefit to themselves, some residents even generously contributed to the cost of the work. 

Your voice matters 

While we firmly believe that our gardens are for everyone, we know that all visitors have different priorities. Dog walkers enjoy our open off-lead areas and dog playground; families benefit from our year-round programme of events, and wildlife lovers and people looking for a spot of calm will seek out quieter spots, including the historically important rose garden and peaceful northern wilderness area. 

The gardening work we do will always be centred around keeping our trees and gardens healthy, boosting biodiversity and managing the beautiful landscape to keep it flourishing for generations to come – but we know we can’t please everyone, all of the time.  

Essential maintenance work can unfortunately have a negative impact on people’s direct experience, due to noise and on-site machinery – and, as we previously mentioned, steps that will improve the health of our trees and woodlands in the long-term can look brutal when first implemented. 

We also need to listen to conservation experts, in addition to our visitors: Letting the Light In has benefited from input from organisations like the Woodland Trust and the Ancient Tree Forum, for example. 

Ultimately, we can’t promise to always do what people ask us to when it comes to our gardens – but we can promise to always listen to people.  

If you’ve seen something that’s worried you, or want to understand more about why we’ve made a certain decision, please do always feel free to get in touch. 

Who are we answerable to? 

All the work we do is overseen by our valued board of trustees, appointed for their specialist expertise and role in the local community, and a reporting to them, a team of independent advisors 

Working together, the board oversee the management of Chiswick House & Gardens Trust and monitor our performance, ensuring we can continue our important work and do the best for our supporters, our visitors, and our local community. 

You can find out more about them here.