Criteria for Evaluating Urban Trees

PANEL DISCUSSION

Moderator: Lorraine Cairnes.
Panel: Greg Moore, Ian Innes, Meredith Walker.

---

Lorraine Cairnes:

Richard thank you for your call to the attention to detail the early part of the lifecycle of the things you are planting or are going to plant and what are the hazards of the early lifetime.

Ian made us think about re-creating rather than just looking over our shoulder and looking what was there in the past he challenges us to think what will we create in the future and he spoke of landscapes as ensembles.

Greg, I love listening to Greg, don’t intervene unless you have to and trees are worthy of our respect and careful management were the quotes that I wrote down. Meredith got some other wonderful ones about roots that I think will stay with us so it’s not just the whole tree its the parts of the tree we have to consider in looking at these living beings.

Robert told us the woes of a Council park projects co-ordinater and he described West Chatswood as a dying landscape and we saw his map showing the change in that part of the world one could only agree with the dilemma faced in that sort of situation of immense change and trying to keep up with that sort of change is the challenge that the Council’s are always faced with he finally called for an SEPP which I can only say is the call of a drowning man.

Ron gave me a couple of wonderful lines trees aren’t the problem society is the problem and finally he said we could manage the risk it just takes a concerted effort so it was great to hear a little bit of advice like that to make me think there is hope after all.

Ingrid and Andrew which you’ve just heard and I probably don’t need to remind you but there is a lot of different ways of looking at and managing trees and evaluating trees and that brings us to the topic of this panel criteria for evaluating urban trees.

Give us your take on what you think we are evaluating, 2 quick points each

Meredith Walker: All values.

Greg Moore:

I’m a bit inclined to go for an amenity value and then a summative approach for the other values. I do that for a couple of reasons I don’t think anyone has ever asked a horticulturalist for the historic value of a tree, you ask a historian and they come up with their particular spin and view on things but for some reason horticultural values arboricultural values are not given the same status and my view is that these different value systems as Meredith said before overlap they’re not in boxes each has their merits and they should be summative and I’d be quite happy to stand on a soap box and say so.

Ian Innes:

I agree strongly with Greg that the horticulturalists and arborists various assessment processes and their views about the helping vision and future of trees in their care currently doesn’t get the weight that they deserve and at the moment the processes people use for assessing tree significance are very much defined by tree conservation practices and having worked with a couple of conservation management plans where I’ve tried to fit individual trees in and groups of trees into assessment criteria I’m aware that I can do it but I’m never comfortable with the outcome. I think amenity of assessments need to get greater weight and we need to find a way that’s adapting the conservation processes so that trees get more comfortable within them.

Lorraine Cairnes:

So you’re suggesting that trees do need their own set of evaluation criteria.

Meredith Walker:

When I said all values I meant look at, record and understand the characteristics and condition as well and maybe it is that some people who are doing plans are not doing that and I think this is a problem about skills and how much resources is put into it but my observations in relation to things of cultural significance is that often their management is done from a horticultural perspective without the arborist is brought in and at that time the heritage values or the history of how it was pruned and the particular design characteristics are not always fully taken into account and I think that there is no reason why we shouldn’t become a little bit more multi skilled in my opinion.

Lorraine Cairnes:

Yes that’s interesting so you’re saying we should get the facts about the tree. I knew somebody that whenever they were applying to lop a tree and it said what sort of tree they’d write down camforloral no matter what sort of tree it was on the basis that they thought Council would say yes and wouldn’t come and look which proved to be right unfortunately.

Getting the facts about a tree does the average tree manager or tree decision maker have access to the facts.

Ian Innes:

The facts vary depending on who you are and the context that you’re working in.

Greg Moore:

I think that the facts are not always available but you’ve got to work for them they don’t necessarily come easy and there a whole range of ways of doing that for example, in my own work, the local historical .......... good old photographs can tell you heaps most of the trees that I know personally have a custodian, it’s not necessarily the person that owns the tree but there is someone in that area that’s kept an eye on that tree and they’re not that usually that hard to find and it’s worth the effort of finding them and the other thing I would say is that the tree tells you a great deal about its history. I mentioned earlier on that you look at a tree and you can tell that it hasn’t shed a large limb, now a lot of people think that that is almost impossible to tell but if you’re a good arborist, a good biologist or horticulturalist you can go to a tree and you know what you’re looking for you’re looking for stubs, you’re looking for the capacity to grow over, to compartmentalise, to produce callous and all of those things will tell you a great deal about whats gone on with that tree.

The presence of epicormics for example, I was asked to look at an Oak, a big Oak not so long ago and I asked the owner when the root system was interfered with and they said its never been interfered with and I said well I think its been interfered with something around ten to twelve years ago, no, no, no, never been interfered with, so I went away and they rang me up later to say that its never been interfered with except for the trench dug through the root system fifteen years previously for an irrigation system. Now how could you tell, because of all the epicormic growth coming off the branches of the Oak, now there’s a potted history that’s in the tree itself and we had the skill and the knowledge to read that history.

Lorraine Cairnes:

That’s and important point isn’t it letting the tree tell it’s own story which can be read by the expert and presumably there will be other things about the tree that you don’t actually have to look very much at the tree to find out about. Meredith in terms of evaluating we’re talking about evaluating the trees I think rather than just its important values or what we might call significant values using the charters, do you think that the charter process of evaluation which requires you to look at the important and significant heritage values and the management issues works for trees.

Meredith Walker:

I see no reason why it shouldn’t but I think that all these processes however one sets them out in boxes only work if you’re informed and really truly understand the principles so I would say the key issue I have seen in management is that people don’t know when they need advice. And it doesn’t matter how well you go through the process if you aren’t asking yourself do I need advice about this value or with this issue is there something I need to know that I haven’t found out you’re never going to be making the best decisions at least for the tree you might be making good decisions for people but not for trees.

So I think the process in the theoretical way the process of understanding values and managing to retain the values that you value is the correct one. For trees there are a lot of skills that are needed and I’m convinced by my colleagues here that those skills are a bit rare and may reside in getting several people in and my conclusion and I hope that you all know that I know absolutely nothing about trees I can never spell the name of anything that we have to develop systems where by we can collect information assess values never on your own absolutely never on your own unless you’ve already established a system that everybody’s agreed with and that has a kind of big policy framework.

Lorraine Cairnes:

In terms of we’re still looking at our first one reflections on the theme and the papers that have been given there seems to me to be emerging an issue of timing do you wait for a crisis wait till somebody’s tripped over the root on the footpath before Robert’s fixed it up or do you wait for a branch to appear to be about to fall off or somebody wants you to do something about the tree before you make the evaluation leading to the decision. What about the timing.

Greg Moore:

The timing is critical and you shouldn’t be reactive you’ve got to be proactive on this sort of thing if you’re reactive then the situation is already out of hand I think. In relation to values, and I’m just going to indulge myself for a second if you don’t mind, but in relation to Ingrid’s paper can I just make a couple of observations. The champion tree system in the states is not a model that I think we should follow because you put a tree up and others challenge it so its about that competitive element and it doesn’t do the things we want the stem system in New Zealand is remarkably idiosyncratic and it reflects a lot of work by Ron Flook but if you’ve ever tried to apply it to an Australian context and you’ve remained sane then I dips my lid to you it just doesn’t work here.

The register of significant trees in the Northern Territory the criteria they’ve got is actually the ones from the national trust in Victoria and theirs is relatively recent and I just wanted to give you a quick view following the ICOMOS and Burra Charter criteria I think we’ve got about ten or maybe fifteen trees or groups of trees protected in Victoria. (Meredith: That’s not the process that’s the threshold of people accepting things the process is the same the threshold of what you think is significant may be different) that’s right and the register of significant trees for the trust has about thirteen hundred specimens on it, it is quite a large register and it is not a legislatively protected listing and it’s not exactly what you’re after here there’s some elements that may be suitable for what you’re interested in, in determining the significance of some but a minority of trees. What we want is a recognition that occurs at local government and they can modify those criteria.

And lastly I just did want to say a little bit about the value of trees I have mixed feelings about putting a monetary value on trees I understand the crassness of it from some peoples perspective and I certainly understand the fact that a tree has an inherent value because it’s a living thing, I understand that better than most, but the simple truth is that in our society decisions are driven by the dollar and I can give you a number of examples fifty trees in Gosch’s Paddock in Melbourne were going to be removed to widen Punt Road the reason fifty were gone was that they didn’t know they were there because they were given a zero value the footpath was valued the kerb was valued even a pipe fence had a value per metre but fifty mature elms had no value and so could go and in a reverse of that when they put in City Link the previous government had so much problem over Albert Park that they were prepared to pay $27,000.00 a tree to take them out and put them back.

I think that reflects the value of those trees in a real monetary sense and people understand the dollar particularly engineers and accountants and marketing people in a decision making process.

Lorraine Cairnes:

We need to have this discussion about monetary values is it a legitimate way of valuing trees. What do you think about inherently building into a system of tree evaluation a monetary value set of criteria.

Ian Innes:

Personally I detest it but I see the value of it in dealing with the range of other people who are associated with open space and tree management at the high level of financing, asset management and funding control and as Greg says unless you can actually put a dollar figure on something in order to make a comparison with an asset of equivalent or lower value

back to top