Arboreport

When a tree matter ends up in front of a court, our Director Adrian Swain is the one who gives the evidence. He provides expert witness testimony on development impacts to existing trees, usually engaged by local government to peer review a report and then attend court on the matter. Adrian is an AQF Level 5 Consulting Arborist and a Registered Landscape Architect, a Fellow and past National President of the Landscape Design Institute, and he has been consulting across landscape, horticulture and arboriculture for over 20 years. Arboreport was established in 2005 and forms part of the AEON Group, which he founded in 2003.

Our Team Leader, Dennis Marsden, brings 40 years in the industry with 28 of them as an arboricultural consultant. He started consulting through Civic Trees in the early 1990s, set up his own practice in 1999, and closed The Sugar Factory Arbor Advocate after 20 years before joining us; he now leads the team on proposals, resourcing, expert witness reporting and decay diagnostics. Andrew Morrison holds a Graduate Certificate in Arboriculture at AQF Level 8 from the University of Melbourne along with 2007 diplomas in arboriculture and landscape design, and Robbie Cunningham came to us in 2020 with a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from UNSW and a Diploma of Arboriculture from Ryde TAFE. Between us that is over 100 years across landscape horticulture and arboriculture, and we hold membership of the Institute of Australian Consulting Arboriculturists, the International Society of Arboriculture, the Australian Institute of Horticulture and the Landscape Design Institute.

Some trees stay with us for decades. Fred the Fig, the Port Jackson Fig barged into Tumbalong Park from the old Homebush abattoir site in the late 1980s, opened up at the base of the stem; Dennis first tested him with the resistograph in 2006 and found the base substantially hollow from a fungal wood rot, and in 2009 Adrian carried out a QTRA assessment for the Sydney Harbour Foreshores Authority and recommended the barrier and signage that keep people off the base today. Fred is still standing behind a box hedge. At North Sydney Oval, Dennis has managed a 1920s Moreton Bay Fig since 2007, mapping the spread of decay with the resistograph, testing the load bearing capacity of the support stems with the fractometer, and taking physical measurements to catch any subsidence in the stems. That is what a defensible recommendation is built on.

On development sites we prepare arboricultural impact assessments and tree protection plans, then stay on as project arborist supervising works in proximity to trees through the construction period, as we did on the Parramatta Light Rail and for Schools Infrastructure NSW. We run tree audits and tree inventories at Barangaroo and the Macquarie University central courtyard, tree risk assessments under both QTRA and TRAQ, and we write amenity, heritage and environmental tree management plans. Those plans have taken six national AILDM awards since 2010, including the 2019 Allan Correy Award for Design Excellence for the Pavilions transplant management plan and gold that same year for the Illabunda ecovillage. AutoCAD, the resistograph, QTRA and TRAQ are all part of the kit our AQF Level 5 and Level 8 arboriculturists work with.

The studio is at Castle Hill in Sydney's north west, and the projects run right across Sydney and out through regional New South Wales, from Barangaroo, The Rocks, North Sydney, Cremorne, Lindfield and Cronulla to Ourimbah, Bonny Hills, Jordan Springs and the Royal Military College at Duntroon. Our enquiry form asks you to pick the service and write us a short project brief, and that is genuinely the fastest way to get a scope and a fee back from us. Send it through, or ring (02) 9680 7713 and talk it over with whoever picks up.