Capability Green Co.

When a matter reaches the Land and Environment Court, we appear as the independent expert witness: reviewing the development documentation, attending Section 34 mediation, preparing the statement of facts and contentions, undertaking joint reporting, and giving impartial expert evidence at hearing and in person. That is one end of what we do at Capability Green Co., a consulting practice of AQF Level 5 arborists and landscape architects with more than 25 years of combined experience behind it.

Long before that, a preliminary tree assessment before you buy or before a designer puts pen to paper tells you which trees are worth retaining and gives you indicative Tree Protection Zones to lay the design out around. Once the plans exist we prepare the arboricultural impact assessment, working through what has to go, what can stay and what could be transplanted, and what the design would need to change for a borderline tree to survive it.

Where a consent is on the table, the Tree Management and Protection Plan is the document the site actually runs on. We issue it in PDF and DWG so it drops straight into the drawing set, with tree locations, retention status, TPZ, SRZ and any incursion areas marked up. Tree risk assessment is done to the TRAQ methodology, a Level 2 ground based inspection with a 360 degree walk around the tree, its parts and the site around it, and we can stay on as project arborist to supervise the works and keep the consent conditions met.

For larger sites and public land, tree surveys and master planning combine Visual Tree Assessment with a TRAQ Level 1 limited inspection across the whole population, and we follow it with a species palette suited to the site rather than a list of whatever is available. Our landscape architecture side means the planting plan and the tree advice come from the same office, which matters when a design has to satisfy a council and still work as a landscape.

We hold membership of the International Society of Arboriculture, Arboriculture Australia, the Institute of Australian Consulting Arboriculturists and TREENET, and we are ISA Tree Risk Assessment qualified. Clients are local councils, state government agencies, developers and homeowners, and we take work across all states and territories of Australia.

If you have a tree in the way of a development, a council request you cannot make sense of, or a matter heading for court, ring Fabian and talk it through. We will tell you which assessment the situation calls for, what it involves, and whether you need one at all.