Rules & Boundaries

The first arborist’s report I ever handed to a council planner came back with a sticky note: “this is a quote, not a report.” That was 2016, a back section off Papanui Road with a scheduled English oak in the corner and a collapsed sewer lateral running through its root zone. The tree was on

In 2019 I spent a winter on a line-clearance contract around Rotorua, working the roads between Ngongotahā and the lake edge, and boarded in a rental on a Lynmore section backing onto a stand of redwoods. The owner had spent the previous spring planting rhododendrons, hostas and a griselinia hedge under the redwoods and along

Last autumn I was sent to Aldwins Road in Linwood to cut back a plum tree dropping fruit onto a neighbour’s driveway. Both owners were waiting on either side of a 1.2-metre paling fence, one holding the council’s tree pamphlet and the other a bucket of squashed plums. The trunk was about 300 millimetres on

A friend went to an open home in Merivale in March 2025, a two-storey villa on a quarter-acre section with a copper beech that shaded half the back lawn. She loved the tree. Then she read the LIM report and found the beech was listed in the Christchurch District Plan’s schedule of Significant Trees, and

In November 2024 I was asked to report on a 14-metre kauri growing 6 metres from a 1970s pole house on a bush section off Scenic Drive in Titirangi. The owners wanted two limbs off the house side so they could stop sweeping the deck. Their neighbour had told them it was a five-minute job

In March 2023 I stood on a deck at Mount Maunganui with a tape across a pōhutukawa limb. In five years it had pushed roughly 1.2 metres further over the neighbour’s garage roof, and the tips were scraping the ridge in a northerly. The tree’s owner wanted nothing touched; the garage’s owner wanted everything gone