The Climbing Dutchman

ISA Board Certified Master Arborist is the top rung of the certification ladder in this trade, and Jor Boogaart holds it. Most people just say Jay. The climbing started at the age of three in Holland and has not really stopped since, and after moving to Australia and settling on the Mornington Peninsula, Jay put twenty five years of it into starting The Climbing Dutchman out of Somerville. It is run as a family legacy, which is a long way of saying that the name on the truck is a name someone has to live with.

Russell Fray came on in 2023, a certified arborist who brought years of running operations across suburban Melbourne and the southern Peninsula. Between them the crew is fully insured, fully licensed and accredited, and small enough that the person who quotes your job is generally the person who does it.

Access is the thing that decides most jobs down here, and two machines settle it. A Mercedes Unimog carries the crew and the gear onto ground a normal truck would bog on or refuse outright, which is what the back country around Red Hill, Red Hill South, Merricks, Shoreham, Point Leo, Balnarring, Tuerong and Moorooduc tends to ask for. Closer in, through Somerville, Frankston, Frankston South, Frankston North, Mount Eliza, Mount Martha, Langwarrin, Langwarrin South, Hastings, Tyabb, Pearcedale and Cranbourne South, the problem is usually the opposite, a tight suburban block, and that is where the Ufkes Greentec crane fed chippers earn their keep: the material is picked up and fed in by machine, and nothing gets dragged across your lawn by hand. On the big or awkward ones we bring in crane assisted tree removal, and where a tree simply cannot be felled in one piece, it is climbed and taken down in sections.

There is one habit worth mentioning because it costs us time and we keep doing it anyway: work stops mid tree if there is a koala or a nesting bird in it, and resumes once they are safe. Around the rest of the work, tree pruning and lopping keep canopies off roofs and boundaries, tree felling handles the ones with room to drop, and stump removal clears what is left below ground. Land clearing takes on whole blocks. Before any of it begins we survey the yard, arrange the permits and deal with the paperwork, so the job stays compliant with local codes rather than becoming your problem later.

We answer emergency calls across the Peninsula around the clock, and the ordinary working day runs 7:30am to 7:30pm, Monday to Sunday. Ring 03 5930 8087 for a free quote. We back the work with a one hundred per cent satisfaction guarantee, and we would rather you held us to it than went quiet.