Tree Care Consulting

Jimmy Ross heads Tree Care Consulting, and he spent a solid stretch of his career inside a council Parks Planning department before he started writing reports for the people on the other side of the counter. He is an AQF Level 5 arborist with a Diploma of Horticulture in Arboriculture from Fairfield Polytechnic, a Cert III in Arboriculture from South West TAFE and a Cert IV in Leadership and Management, and he has more than ten years in the tree care industry. The business is family owned and Australian, and it services Geelong and greater Victoria.

Two standards do most of the heavy lifting in this work. Advice on a development site is written to AS4970-2009, the Australian Standard for the protection of trees on development sites, and pruning advice and specifications are written to AS4373-2007 for amenity trees. The second one matters more than it sounds, because a specification written to the standard hands your contractor a defined scope and not a free hand with a saw.

On the planning side we produce preconstruction and design reports while there is still room to move a footing, then construction impact reports once the design is fixed and the question becomes what the build will actually do to the trees. Tree protection and management plans set out the measures for the site, project supervision keeps them in place while the work runs, and we advise on managing trees through a subdivision where one title becomes several. Where the roots are the unknown, exploratory root excavations establish what is under the ground before a design commits to it.

For the trees themselves, a health assessment report works out what condition a tree is in and why it is going backwards, and a practical tree management plan turns that into work you can schedule and budget. We take on tree hazard assessment on the risk side, from a single tree standing over a house through to the risk management of large tree populations across a school, a golf course or a council reserve. Where trees are part of a property negotiation, pre-sale consultancy gives you the position before contracts are signed, and our tree planting and transplanting advice covers what goes in and what can be moved instead of lost.

The client list runs from land developers, town planning consultants, project managers, architects and building designers through to golf courses, schools, builders, local government departments and homeowners. We hold membership of Arboriculture Australia and the Victorian Tree Industry Organisation, and we carry $20,000,000 in public liability and $5,000,000 in professional indemnity cover. Ring or email with the site address and what the council, the buyer or the builder has asked for, and we will tell you which report answers it, what the inspection involves, and how quickly it can be turned around.