Northern Arbor Care

Northern Arbor Care is a family owned outfit working the inner north of Melbourne, run by a fully certified climbing arborist. The tagline is high standards for high climbing, and their own description of the work is tree connoisseurs rather than butchers, which is a fair distinction in a trade where the gap between pruning and hacking comes down to training. The business carries $20 million in insurance and a high risk work licence, with regular OHS and skills training behind it.

Tree removal covers the full job, backed by rigging, chippers and crane work for the trees that cannot simply be dropped. Access is the usual constraint through here: single fronted houses, no rear lane, and a tree that has to come out in pieces over the roof. Stump grinding takes out what is left. Tree lopping and trimming handles the trees that need reducing rather than removing, which in the tight inner north is most of them.

Tree pruning is done to arboricultural standards, a point they make deliberately, meaning cuts placed where the tree can seal them rather than wherever the ladder happened to reach. Getting the timing and the volume right is what keeps a mature tree serviceable for another twenty years instead of starting it into decline. Tree maintenance is the ongoing version, for people who would rather manage a tree than replace it. Hedge trimming keeps the boundary work in order.

Mulching puts the chip back into the garden instead of onto a truck. Arborist reports are written for council permits and for the arguments that come up over trees between neighbours or ahead of a build, and they are worth having before you commit rather than after a knockback. They also run 24/7 emergency attendance for storm damaged and hazardous trees, which through the inner north tends to mean an old elm or a peppercorn dropping a limb across a laneway.

The area covered is the inner and near north: Brunswick, Coburg and Coburg North, Pascoe Vale, Oak Park, Glenroy, Essendon, Moonee Ponds and Strathmore. That is old housing stock with mature street and backyard trees on small blocks, so a good share of the job is getting the tree out over a fence without marking anything on the way down.