Let's Talk About Trees

Plenty of arborists will not give you a fixed price for a report. Let's Talk About Trees bills in six clearly identified levels instead, priced on what is actually standing on your site, so email through a site plan or a photo and a fixed quote comes back. If we can see a variable in it, we say so before you commit. I am Matt Branagh, and this is a consulting and training practice.

I set it up in 2011. Before that I spent over a decade in local government managing parks and arboriculture, including senior management in the City of Greater Geelong Parks Department, and then a decade in the private sector as General Manager of what was at the time one of Victoria's largest tree maintenance companies. I held that role at Bellarine Tree Services for eight years, then moved into organisational implementation and development and built the systems that took the company through full independent ISO audit in 2010. My qualification is a Diploma of Applied Science in Horticulture (Arboriculture), alongside a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment, advanced certificates in arboriculture and horticulture and a certificate in risk management, and I have sat through seminars with Dr Alex Shigo and Professor Dr Claus Mattheck.

The report levels scale with what is in front of them. A Letter of Identification is the smallest and the cheapest, a formal identification of a tree or plant on your property, which local government often wants before it will issue a removal permission and which saves people hundreds against scoping a full report they never needed. Level 1 looks at a single tree for health and retention value, gathering the genus, species, height, spread, age, health, major defects and retention value. Level 2 covers two to four trees and is the one most often asked for on a council planning matter. Level 3 is the standard for a development site at four to fifteen trees. Levels 4 and 5 are built for larger areas and the ongoing audit of parks and reserves.

The people who ring are rarely after the same thing. A homeowner wants one tree looked at. Caravan parks, school committees, camp grounds and cemetery trusts want asset management and risk assessment across a whole site of public recreation or amenity land. Builders, draftspeople, architects, developers and engineers want reports for development sites, and some of them want me back as the site arborist for the life of the contract. The work has taken me in for VicRoads, Parks Victoria, the City of Greater Geelong, the Borough of Queenscliff, Wyndham City Council, ACT Parks and Places, the Department of Defence, Deakin University, Melbourne Water, Barwon Water and Wannon Water, and it runs across Geelong, the Bellarine Peninsula, the Surf Coast, Ballarat and country Victoria.

Either side of a report there is consultation: management plans, retention and risk, valuation, root investigation, root damage, nuisance and negligence, forensic investigation, species selection, specifications, site analysis, stock assessments and strategic policy. Ecology gets weighed inside that work instead of being bolted on at the end of it. I also deliver arboricultural training and lecture from Certificate 1 through to Certificate 5, in the government university system and through private registered training organisations.

This is advisory work. I do not run a crew and I do not take trees down, so nothing in the advice is attached to selling you a removal. Let's Talk About Trees is a sole trader carrying $5,000,000 in professional indemnity and $20,000,000 in public liability cover. If you want a reference before you commit to anything, ring or email and I am only too happy to give you a contact to call. Send the site plan or a photo through at the same time and I will come back to you with a fixed price.