Tree Removal
in Blackburn
If a tree in a Blackburn garden has any size to it, start from the assumption that you need council approval before it comes out. Whitehorse protects trees by locality, and Blackburn is named in three of the eight landscape overlay schedules the council sets out: Schedule 1 is Blackburn Area 1, Schedule 2 is Blackburn Area 2, and Schedule 4 is Blackburn Early Settlement Neighbourhood Character, Vegetation Retention. A fourth, Schedule 5, names individual properties, among them 1 Lake Road Blackburn and 57-67 Central Road, Blackburn. The tree does not have to be a big one to be caught, because a protected tree is one that has a single trunk circumference of 50 centimetres or more, when measured 1 metre above ground level. That is a tape run around the trunk rather than across it, which makes for a much slimmer tree than the number suggests.
Two things complicate that answer. The first is the creek. Gardiners Creek, which the council records as an urban waterway originating near Blackburn, carries a landscape schedule of its own inside the municipality, and it drops the girth test completely. To escape a permit on size there, a tree has to come in under all three of a height of less than 6 metres, a trunk diameter of less than 0.4 metres measured at 1.4 metres up the trunk, and a canopy diameter of less than 4 metres. Clear two of those and fail the third and you are still applying. The second complication is where the tape goes. The landscape schedules read the trunk at 1 metre, the statewide canopy clause at 1.4 metres, and the environmental overlay reads a dead trunk at 1.3 metres above ground level. Three heights inside one council. Which set your tree answers to varies block by block rather than suburb by suburb, so the council asks you to enter your address and establish if there are any overlays on your property before anybody quotes you.
What makes those rules bite here is what is standing. Council names Blackburn among the suburbs where native trees dominate, and puts the municipality’s upper tree canopy at 26.6%, with another 21.5% under other vegetation. Blackburn Lake Sanctuary is the largest bushland park in Whitehorse at roughly 27 hectares, and Blackburn Creeklands runs three more reserves along the water. Not every big tree here is indigenous, though. A 2002 council study of the lake surrounds recorded gardens holding predominantly exotic plants alongside scattered large pin oaks, liquidambars, spotted gums and lemon-scented gums, and the eucalypts the council lists as indigenous to the area take in manna gum, swamp gum, candlebark and yellow box. A planted tree gets no discount for being planted, and at mature size any of them sits well over the 50 centimetre trigger. The ground matters too. The district sits on Silurian mudstone and sandstone in undulating terrain cut by creeks, so where a block falls away toward a creek reserve there is no drop zone, and the tree has to be taken apart from the top rather than felled.
What Blackburn tree removal costs
Those are national bands to start from, not a survey of this suburb, and anyone naming a price down the phone has not seen the tree. In Blackburn the paperwork often moves the total more than the cutting does, because on a protected tree the permit comes first. A single tree can go the quick way through VicSmart, a 10 day (working days) permit process with a checklist headed Remove, destroy or lop one tree. Two trees in one application cannot, and neither can a second tree later the same year, because only one (1) VicSmart permit approval for tree removal or lopping is allowed in any 12 month period per property. Lodgement charges are set in the state fee regulations rather than by the council, so read them off the council’s published planning application fees instead of a figure someone half remembers. There is more on grinding prices in our stump removal cost guide, and on the shape of a whole job in the tree removal cost guide. Prices include GST.
Tree removal, stump grinding and pruning in Blackburn
How to choose an arborist in Blackburn
Three schedules have this suburb’s name on them
Start by asking which one your property sits in, because the answer is not the same across Blackburn. Schedules 1, 2 and 4 are named for Blackburn areas and the early settlement character, and Schedule 5 lists named large sites. Independently of all that, the council publishes Vegetation Protection Overlay maps for Blackburn, Blackburn North and Blackburn South under VPO 1 and VPO 3, which protect nominated trees rather than areas. They stack rather than compete, and the council warns you to refer to each zone and overlay requirements as some have differing controls regarding trees. Anyone giving you a permit answer before they have your street number is describing somebody else’s block.
The creek runs on its own numbers
A block backing onto the water answers to the creek schedule, and it is not only the tree that is caught. Buildings, works and even fences are pulled in, with the tests keyed to distance from the top of bank of the waterway, and vegetation is exempted separately where it is identified as a weed species in the Advisory List of Environmental Weeds in Victoria. The size test is written in trunk diameter rather than the girth the other schedules use, so a measurement taken for one overlay does not answer the other. If your back fence looks onto the Creeklands, say so when you book the quote.
You get one quick approval a year
This is the detail that reorders a job. The fast track is VicSmart, a streamlined assessment process for straightforward planning permit applications decided in ten working days, and the tree version of it covers one tree. But as of 28 October 2022 the State Government have advised only one (1) VicSmart permit approval for tree removal or lopping is allowed in any 12 month period per property. Spend it on the wrong tree and the next one waits out the year or goes the long way. Walk the whole block with the arborist before anything is lodged.
Make them measure in front of you
A trunk figure means nothing on its own, because Whitehorse asks for it three different ways. The number has to say whether it is girth or width, and how far up the trunk it was taken. Watch the height especially. A tree can fall short of the landscape schedule trigger, which is 50 centimetres or more, when measured 1 metre above ground level, and still be caught by the statewide clause, because that one reads the trunk higher up and adds separate tests for height and crown spread. Ask for the tape reading, the height it was taken at, and which control it was checked against. An operator who will not do that in front of you is not the one to trust with the application.
Lopping is a defined word here
It is what people search and it is not what you want bought. The council writes both terms down, and only one of them is a technique. Lopping, in its definition, is a cut taken between branch unions or internodes. Pruning turns instead on approved practices, to achieve a specified objective such as for regeneration or ornamental shaping. The permit exemption is written around the pruning definition. Beyond the planning consequence, a stub cut cannot seal over. The regrowth comes back as a cluster of shoots gripping nothing but rotting wood, and that is what tears out in the next big wind. Our guide on choosing a lopper or an arborist covers the difference.
The pest the council flags is not this end of town
Worth knowing before somebody sells you a treatment. Council puts elm leaf beetle outbreaks in the western heritage areas of the municipality, and describes Blackburn instead as one of the suburbs where native trees dominate. On a native canopy the questions worth asking are structural ones: a fork where two stems have grown together with bark trapped in the join, deadwood sitting over a roofline, a heavy limb reaching out over the neighbour. Ask for those to be named in the quote, with a reason given for each cut.
Which ticket the job actually needs
Two qualifications matter here and they are not interchangeable. The climbing and felling ticket is a Certificate III in Arboriculture, known in the trade as AQF Level 3; the one behind a written report is a Diploma, AQF Level 5. Arboriculture Australia treats both as registration categories rather than legal licences, and attaches insurance floors to them: $5m of public liability, plus $2m of professional indemnity for consulting work. Read those as a starting line, not a recommendation. On a protected Blackburn tree the practical test is narrower anyway, because the application wants a signed assessment, and only one of the two tickets produces one.
Frequently asked questions
Arborists in Blackburn
Businesses covering Blackburn and the suburbs either side of it: Surrey Hills and Box Hill to the west, Nunawading and Mitcham to the east, Glen Waverley and Burwood to the south, and out through Bayswater and the Croydons. Each listing shows the scope a business really handles, the hours it answers, and a number that rings the operator rather than a call centre. Position in this list is not for sale, nobody buys your enquiry off us, and we take nothing out of what you pay the crew.
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