Deep Rainforest

In 1976 the family's retail nursery was John Prince's childhood backyard, and he has not been away from plants since. He has grown them wholesale, run a landscape contracting business and an essential oil plantation, gone bio prospecting through South East Asia, and since 2004 designed commercial, residential and industrial landscapes across more than 2,000 projects. Deep Rainforest works off all of that: fifty years of plants, shovels and drawings sitting behind every document that leaves this desk.

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

The studio is deliberately small, and that is an advantage for the people working alongside us. Cutting out the unnecessary layers means you deal with the person drawing your plans, and it leaves room to dig further into a brief instead of passing it down a chain. Gareth Cuthbert covers landscape construction, project planning, budget preparation, tendering and contract management, having previously been principal estimator for Australia's largest landscape construction company, and his strength is documentation and concept presentation. Between the two of us that takes in environmental management plans for vegetation, open space and rehabilitation, development approval concept drawings, construction cost assessments, detailed landscape plans for Operational Works approval, ADAC as constructed contributed assets drawings, 3D animated walkthroughs, project management and compliance certification.

Site conditions, council requirements and budget constraints are what make a green space difficult to get approved, and that is the gap we work in, on commercial, industrial and residential projects from Currumbin Valley and out across the Gold Coast. If you have a tree a development application has to account for, or a landscape that needs to get through council, ring John on 0412 232 877 or send him an email. Tell us what the site is and how far the application has already got, and we will tell you what can be done with it.