Deep Rainforest

John Prince has been in horticulture since 1976, when the family's retail nursery was his childhood backyard. He has grown plants wholesale, run a landscape contracting business and an essential oil plantation, and since 2004 he has designed commercial, residential and industrial landscapes across more than 2,000 projects. That is the ground Deep Rainforest works from: four decades of plants, shovels and drawings sitting behind every set of documents that leaves our desk.

John is an AQF 5 Consultative Arborist and a PBR Qualified Consultant in botany, with trade qualifications in arboriculture, revegetation and irrigation, plus certification in site supervision. Where a development puts pressure on existing trees, we prepare the arboricultural assessments, reports and tree management plans that set out what can be retained, what cannot, and what has to happen on site to keep the retained trees alive. When a tree matter ends up in front of a court or a council planning meeting, we turn up and speak to our own findings.

Site conditions, council requirements and budget constraints are the three things that make a green space hard to get approved, and most of what we do sits in that gap. We prepare environmental management plans covering vegetation, open space and rehabilitation, development approval concept drawings and construction cost assessments, then carry a project through to detailed landscape plans for Operational Works approval, ADAC 'as constructed contributed assets' drawings, and 3D animated walkthroughs where a client needs to see the thing before it exists. Project management and compliance certification keep the work honest once it is being built.

We keep the team small on purpose and cut the unnecessary layers out of the process, so you deal directly with the people doing the drawings. Gareth Cuthbert looks after landscape construction, project planning, budget preparation, tendering and contract management, having previously been principal estimator for Australia's largest landscape construction company, and he holds qualifications in parks and gardens, landscape design and horticulture. Between us we work across the Gold Coast on commercial, industrial and residential projects.

Every project is different, but the way we approach one does not change: read the site properly, work out what the council will actually ask for, and design something that can be built for the money available. If you have a tree that a development application has to account for, or a landscape that needs to get through council, ring John on 0412 232 877 and tell us what the site is and how far the application has got. We will tell you what we can do with it.