Burnham gardener praised for cutting back 'dangerous' overgrown verge

A gardener who cut back a ‘dangerous’ overgrown verge at a junction in Burnham in his own time has been praised for his work. 

But while Ian Dodimead said he feels ‘pretty good’ to have done this for the community, he has called for Buckinghamshire Council to prioritise issues such as these. 

Earlier this month, village resident Ian took to the junction of Orchardville and Lent Rise Road to tackle an overgrown verge which he said was taller than him and restricted views for both drivers and pedestrians. 

He carried out the work after seeing a post on the Burnham Village Residents Page Facebook group which called the verge on the corner of the the junction a ‘jungle’, and added the road sign could no longer be seen. 

The post asked if anything could be done to ‘spur’ Buckinghamshire Council to cut it back, like it had done with the verge on the other side of the junction.  

Ian said: “I looked at it and it was taller than me. It was like weeds and grass taller than me."

The IAM Gardening Services business owner explained that, due to how tall the overgrown verge was, there was a potential that children could not be seen behind it either.

“Not only was it dangerous because if you’re coming out of Orchardville and you’re going left, you couldn’t see the traffic coming or a kid, whatever.

“But also, the other side of the verge, [you] couldn’t really walk down the path because it was all coming over.”

“I thought, I’ll go and do it,” he added.

“I came and started doing it, I couldn’t strim it. [The] weeds were so thick that I had to get the hedge cutter.”

Ian explained that it ‘wasn’t the biggest verge in the world’, but it took him about three hours to complete all the work. 

“I filled two [builders] tonne bags full of weeds and grass just from that one verge.”

His work and ‘the power of social media’ was later praised on Facebook.

Ian was previously praised by the community in 2021 for clearing an overgrown footpath connecting Lent Rise Road in Burnham to Hitcham and Taplow. 

He added that he feels ‘pretty good’ to have done this for the Burnham community. 

“I get that they [the council] can’t keep up with everything, but they had cut the other side.”

Ian called for Buckinghamshire Council to prioritise tackling anything unsafe or in need of immediate attention. 

He said: “What they should do is go for the stuff that is at junctions, or safety and all that sort of stuff first. 

“The rest of it, if you get to it, you get to it.”

Richard Barker, corporate director for communities at Buckinghamshire Council, said: “Buckinghamshire, like many other parts of the south, is experiencing particularly vigorous early growth in grass and other roadside vegetation as a result of the prolonged wet and mild weather. 

“We carry out three ‘visibility cuts’ around junctions through the growing season and two cycles of urban verge cuts in areas where this service hasn’t been devolved to the local town or parish council.  

“Given the fast paced growth this year, we are bringing in additional crews to ensure we cover as many of the cuts needed as quickly as we can.

 “As well as this, we respond to individual sites where additional cutting is needed for safety reasons if these are reported to the council via our website using the Fix My Street service – we have already responded to around 150 such requests this spring and we of course prioritise any requests where visibility and safety is an issue.”