Grounds maintenance

Selwood Housing owns and manages open spaces throughout Wiltshire and beyond, as well as looking after many outside communal areas and gardens within our communities.

The management of the grass, trees, hedges and shrubs on this land is called grounds maintenance.

Our grounds maintenance contractor John O’Conner undertakes grass cutting, hedge cutting, shrub and border upkeep and weeding, as well as maintenance of footpaths and hard surfaces from March to November. They are an experienced contractor, working with a number of housing associations, councils and other organisations.

During peak periods or due to unfavourable weather conditions, there may be some delays to grounds maintenance services but we aim to reach all our sites at least once a month.

Online schedule

John O’Conner has designed a dedicated website where you can find out when they’re due in your area. Due to busy periods and weather conditions, we cannot give exact dates when works will be carried out, please use this schedule as a guide.

Selwood Housing – John O’Conner

Grass cutting

Customers regularly ask why the grass cuttings aren’t collected. Keeping footpaths clear is our priority and we always clear clippings after strimming. In other locations, leaving the clippings is much better – they’re a natural fertiliser and protect against weeds.

We also often receive customer calls pointing out we’ve ‘missed’ a particular area. What isn’t always clear to the customer is that the work is still underway! It can take 2-3 days for a job to be completed on large estates, so please keep that in mind.

A staggering 334,817 sqm (approx. 83 acres) of grass is cut by John O’Conner for our customers each month. That’s the equivalent of around 42 football pitches! As you can imagine, this is a huge task to coordinate and a little different to the logistics of mowing a typical garden lawn.

Hedge cutting

Hedge cutting is avoided during the height of nesting season, and checks are done before any cutting takes place to ensure nesting birds are not present or disturbed.

Trees

We are responsible for maintaining trees on our communal land, to ensure that they do not pose a health and safety risk to members of the public. Our policy is to protect our existing trees wherever possible so that works are only carried out if a tree is dead, dying, diseased, dangerous, likely to cause damage to property or is inappropriately located. You can read our tree policy here:

We will only treat trees within our customer’s gardens that are deemed a health and safety risk, or that are causing damage to property. We may charge our tenant for any work we undertake.

As a Selwood Housing customer, if you are concerned about a tree on our land, or within your garden please let us know.

Do you have a question?

If you have any questions about our grounds maintenance service, please call us on 01225 715 715.

We will first check if the land or feature in question is owned by Selwood Housing. If it is not, and the land is within Wiltshire, you can report your query to Wiltshire Council via the ‘MyWiltshire’ app.

Looking for tips on caring for your garden?

Visit our tips and advice pages for helpful tips to support you throughout the seasons.

Find out more