Who are Barcham?

Barcham Trees have pioneered and promoted container tree production on a large scale in this country. Founded in 1980 the nursery originally produced a range of seedlings and open ground trees since the early 1990’s.

Dissatisfied with the loss rate following transplanting to the final planting site our Managing Director Mike Glover began to experiment with container production.

His quest was to find a method of production which would provide the customer with a tree capable of transplanting successfully and becoming established with a minimum of post planting stress especially in extreme urban situations.

Confident that a tree capable of surviving in the most hostile of environments would certainly be successful in all situations. Glover persisted even though the accepted form of tree supply at the time was either bare root or rootballed. Early trials with a rudimentary white container proved very successful with trees containerised producing a vibrant, full fibrous root system which transplanted successfully. The first 500 trees in white containers for market were produced on the nursery in 1991.

Since then the nursery has grown steadily, as more customers have seen the value of container grown trees, to the current size where some 80,000 trees are containerised each year, with the tree nursery now covering an area of over 180 acres.

Currently the nursery has capacity to hold 160,000 trees. Trees are now containerised using the Barcham designed potting machine which has the capacity to pot over 1000 trees each day during the dormant season. This machine is the only one of it’s kind and was the brainchild of  Production Director Warren Holmes-Chatfield designed the machine using a piece of scrap paper, sketching out the innovative design which was later turned into reality by a local foundry.

Innovation in container tree production has been the Barcham trademark with the new light pot being the latest in a long line of successful modifications to the original product introduced so modestly just fifteen or so years ago.

Barcham successfully completed the building of two reservoirs on the nursery in 2005.  The reservoirs have a capacity of 72,000m³ which are filled in the winter by pumping water from a ditch that runs along the Northern boundary of the nursery for use during the summer months.

The extend of irrigation on the nursery is monitored daily and is influenced by information from a weather station which is situated on the nursery, recording local atmospheric conditions.  This ensures that water is used efficiently and economically throughout the seasons.