The Grange Business Park
Weekly grounds maintenance across a managed business park in Bishop's Cleeve, plus four landscape improvement projects that turned dead corners of the estate into space people actually use.
Ongoing Grounds Maintenance Contract
VISITS PER YEAR
0
OPERATIVES PER VISIT
0
IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS
0
AWARDS FOR THE ESTATE
0
| Client | The Grange Business Park |
| Sector | Property & Estates |
| Location | Bishop's Cleeve, Gloucestershire |
| Services | Grounds Maintenance, Arboriculture, Tree Surveys, Landscaping |
| Contract | Ongoing weekly maintenance, with improvement projects quoted separately; records for this site run from 2023 |
The Brief
What the estate needed
The Grange is a working business park. Tenants, their staff and their visitors see the grounds before they see anyone from the buildings, so the estate needed a contractor who could hold a consistent standard across a large commercial site week in, week out, without anyone having to chase.
The second half of the brief mattered just as much. Parts of the estate had quietly gone to waste: scrub, ivy and dumped material in the corners nobody walked through, and an entrance that had been swallowed by ivy. The managing team wanted those areas turned into something with a purpose, whether that was somewhere to sit at lunchtime, better habitat, or simply a decent first impression at the gate.
Alongside that sat the ordinary duty of care on a site with mature trees and public footfall: knowing what condition the trees are in, and dealing with anything that becomes a risk before it becomes an incident.
The Work § 01
A wildlife and wellbeing area from a wasted corner
An unused area of the estate, overgrown with ivy and holding a quantity of dumped waste material, was cleared out and rebuilt as a space for people. The team stripped the waste, pollarded the trees around it to get light back in, laid a winding stone-edged path through the planting, bark-mulched the ground and installed benches and a pergola so staff had somewhere to walk to and sit at break times.
The paths are 1.5 metres wide, concrete edged and laid to join a circular seating area, deliberately built to match a pathway already on site so the whole thing reads as one scheme rather than a bolt-on.
The result does two jobs at once. It gives the people working on the park a genuine reason to step outside, and it turns a neglected corner into planted, structured habitat instead of a monoculture of ivy.
The estate entered the finished scheme for external recognition and it won, twice: a national Gold at the Green Apple Environment Awards in the habitat and biodiversity category, presented at Kensington Palace in November 2024, followed by a Bronze at the International CSR Excellence Awards at St Paul’s Cathedral in June 2025. The awards are the client’s. The ground work behind them is ours.
The Work § 02
A first impression at the entrance
The main roundabout is the first thing anyone sees on the way in, and it had been taken over by ivy, which had also climbed the feature cedar standing in the middle of it. The team stripped the ivy off the bed and off the tree itself, took the ivy and contaminated soil off site by grab lorry, rotavated the ground to lift out as much remaining root as possible, then brought in eight tonnes of fresh topsoil to get the bed back to level and back to a condition that would actually grow something.
Two constraints shaped how it was done, and both were identified at survey rather than discovered halfway through. The cedar in the middle carries a Tree Preservation Order, so its roots could not be cut or damaged, which ruled out simply digging the bed out. And there are live drains under the roundabout. The clearance was worked around both.
It was replanted with a mix of shrubs and bedding, roses, rhododendron, hebe, lavender and lilac alongside begonias, geraniums, dahlias and snapdragons, and every scrap of arisings left site.
It is not a one-off. The planting scheme is refreshed seasonally, so the entrance carries colour through the year rather than looking sharp in May and tired by October.
The Work § 03
Giving two veteran conifers their best chance
A bank to the left of the main entrance, under a mature cedar and a wellingtonia, was sitting beneath a thick blanket of ivy with soil built up around the bases. Both are bad news for trees of that age: the ivy competes and hides defects, and soil piled over the root collar holds damp against the trunk.
The trees are protected, and the method was agreed with the council before any work started. Everything under the cedar was done fully by hand, with no machinery anywhere beneath it. The ivy was cleared manually and the excess soil lifted off the root collar the same way, to keep the roots safe. The area was then finished with fresh topsoil and woodchip to hold the weeds back and keep moisture where the roots want it.
You will see a cut on the cedar in the photographs. That work was carried out with the council’s full permission.
The Work § 04
A vegetable garden the tenants run themselves
A flat patch of rough grass near the trees was built out into a working vegetable garden: raised sleeper beds, a self-binding gravel path between them, a shed for tools and a water butt for irrigation. It was handed over for office staff on the park to use at their own discretion.
It is a small piece of landscaping with an outsized effect. The estate gets an amenity that costs it nothing to run, and the space stays looked after because the people using it want it that way.
The Routine
What the weekly visit actually covers
Improvement projects get the photographs, but the contract is the weekly visit. Two operatives attend every week, and the scope is deliberately broad so the estate is not ringing round three suppliers for the things that fall between grass cutting and building maintenance.
Included in the weekly round
- Grass cutting across the estate
- Hedge maintenance
- Moss treatment
- Litter picking
- Bus shelter cleaning
- Weed control
- Ivy control
- Road sweeping
- Signage cleaning
- Seasonal leaf clearance
On top of that sits the tree work. Silver Tree has carried out repeated tree surveys across the site and delivered the work they call for: crown lifting, crown reductions, removal of hazardous limbs and general safety work around the routes staff and visitors use. The trees are individually tagged and numbered on site, so work is specified against a particular tree rather than a vague description, and pruning is written to BS3998:2010 rather than left to whoever turns up.
The surveys are refreshed annually, so the estate has a current written position on its trees rather than an out of date one, and arisings are processed and removed from site as standard.
The Result
Where it landed
The estate holds a national Gold from the Green Apple Environment Awards and a Bronze from the International CSR Excellence Awards, both won on the back of the wildlife area Silver Tree built. Four separate corners of the site that were previously scrub, ivy or dumped material are now planted, usable space.
Underneath that, the ordinary measure: the same two operatives every week, a maintained standard across the whole park, an annual tree survey on file, and a client who has come back for improvement project after improvement project across three years.
Why choose Silver Tree Services
Silver Tree Services has traded for over 20 years from Shurdington, Cheltenham, with 30+ qualified staff across seven specialist teams, ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certification, ARB Approved Contractor status, and SMAS SSIP accreditation. Crews are NPTC-certificated with IPAF and CSCS where work requires it, RAMS are produced per site, DBS-checked operatives are available for sensitive settings, and public and employers’ liability insurance covers every job. The client list, NHS, Gloucestershire Police, Stroud District Council, Savills, the Church of England, is the vetting evidence.
Your Site Next
Business park, office campus,
managed estate.
If your grounds are the first thing your tenants and their visitors see, tell us about the site and we will quote it straight, with references from contracts like this one.
Or call · 01242 472560