Tree Live

Council has come back asking for an arborist report before it will look at your tree permit, or a development application has stalled on the trees along the boundary. That is usually the point at which the phone rings at Tree Live. We are a consulting arborist practice based at Narellan Vale in South West Sydney, and the report is the whole job here. Mitchell Marino has been working as a consulting arborist since 2005, starting on an AQF Level 4 Certificate in Horticulture and Arboriculture, upgrading to the AQF Level 5 Diploma between 2014 and 2016, and completing the postgraduate AQF Level 8 Graduate Certificate of Arboriculture at Melbourne University in 2021. He is ISA Tree Risk Assessment Qualified through to 2029 and a Registered Consulting Arborist with Arboriculture Australia, member number 3263.

The council areas we work through are Camden, Campbelltown, Wollondilly, Georges River, Wingecarribee, Liverpool, Canterbury Bankstown, Fairfield, Penrith and Wollongong. That list is not exhaustive and anything outside it gets considered case by case, particularly where there is an existing relationship. Knowing how tree protection law sits at local, state and federal level, and knowing the individual councils behind it, is a large part of what you are actually paying for.

Here is the position we take on removals, and it is worth knowing before you engage anybody. We will write a report advocating removal where there are reasonable grounds for it and a fair chance of success with the council. We write those reports with a conscience. At the onsite consultation we look at the decisive factors, tree vigour, target analysis and tree defects, and tell you plainly whether they are going to work in your favour once a council officer is reading the report. That conversation happens before you commit to anything, and it has saved people the cost of an application that was never going to get up.

Arboricultural impact assessment reports are what a council wants when trees sit on or beside a site you intend to build on, whether that is a Development Application or a Complying Development Certificate, and ours follow Australian Standard 4970-2009 for the protection of trees on development sites. A pre-development onsite consultation gets the tree constraints in front of you while the design can still move. Once work is underway we take the site project arborist role, writing the tree protection specifications, certifying installations to the council's requirements, observing the digging, making sure roots are cut cleanly, and advising on tree sensitive construction methods as they come up.

Where the question is simply whether a tree is safe, our tree risk assessments use the ISA TRAQ methodology, which weighs the danger a tree presents against what is standing underneath it, because a falling limb only becomes a risk where there is a target to hit. Tree health reports cover structure, condition, vigour and vitality against current formulae, and are often what gets a neighbour or a council to act on a tree you do not own. We also handle pest and disease identification and management, aerial inspections for the parts of a canopy nobody can read from the ground, and root mapping and root pruning reports, which can open up development on ground that used to be written off as too close to a tree.

Three others are worth naming. A pre-purchase inspection tells you what you are taking on before you sign on a property, because a mature tree in poor condition arrives with a cost attached. Aboriginal Scarred Tree assessment and reports deal with culturally modified trees, which have to be identified properly before anyone makes a decision about them. In the Campbelltown local government area, tree pruning specifications are required before pruning anything taller than five metres and the written specification has to be kept for two years afterwards, and we have been writing them for years. If your project involves trees, email the design plans through and you will have a fee proposal back quickly. Otherwise ring Mitchell, tell us what the tree is and what the report is for, and we will book the onsite consultation in.