ArborRowe

Twenty years ago this was trees and nothing much else. Two decades on, ArborRowe still climbs and still grinds stumps, but the yard on the Princes Highway at Heywood now sends out vegetation crews, traffic crews and a VicRoads accredited civil team as well. The growth was not planned in a boardroom. It came from customers in the south west asking whether we could also do the next thing, and us going and getting the gear and the tickets to do it.

The patch runs from Heywood out to Portland, Hamilton, Casterton and through the rest of south west Victoria. On any given week that means a residential block, a rural property, a commercial site, a local school and a government contract, and we are set up so none of those has to wait behind another.

The civil side is the clearest example of how the business widened. It began with fixing guard rails. From there it grew into installing, replacing and repairing frangible signs, patching minor potholes and retaining and repairing wire rope safety barriers to VicRoads standards. Doing that properly meant a fleet to match, so we run civil construction trucks with cranes, Flocon road patching trucks, Bobcats, whackapackers, augers, vibrating rollers and portable welding setups. When a tree comes down across a road, the same company that clears it can also make the road safe again and manage the traffic while it happens.

On the tree side the machine usually decides the method before anyone picks up a saw. A Leguan 190 spider lift walks through gates and across lawns that no truck could cross, and our EWP trucks reach up to nineteen metres for the ones that are simply too tall to climb comfortably. We run seven chippers from six inch through to fourteen inch, so the chipper that comes to a suburban Portland nature strip is not the one that goes out on a roadside clearing job. For what is left in the ground there is a diesel Stump Muncher, hydrostatically driven with the engine mounted low to keep its centre of gravity down, a Rayco Super Crawler running 39gpm at 5,500psi, and an RG40 self propelled stump cutter on flotation tyres for soft or wet ground.

The work itself starts with looking. Before any tree removal we examine the tree, survey what is around it and clear a safe fall path, and where the space is tight we take the branches off first to bring the footprint down. Vegetation management is the ongoing version of the same thinking, keeping trimming and pruning to a plan across a property rather than reacting to whatever has grown into something. Once the tree is down, stump removal finishes it, and the environmental protocols we work to on every site are there to protect soil nutrition and keep contaminants out of the ground.

Nothing that comes off a job is wasted if we can help it. The foliage goes through the chippers on site and comes back out as mulch delivery, which you can order by the load whether or not we have ever taken a tree off your place. Ring the office on (03) 5527 2188 and we will come out, walk the site with you and tell you what we would actually do about it.