During a recent visit to London, I had the pleasure of meeting two dedicated LTOs, Richard Edwards (Croydon) and David Houghton (Camden). I’m an urban forester from Brisbane City. Brisbane City Council covers just over 1300 square kilometers, includes around 1 million residents, an estimated 575,000 street trees and total tree canopy cover of 46%.

Like many other international urban tree managers I’ve had the privilege to meet over my 20 years in local government, Richard and David were keen to share their local successes and challenges.

I was particularly interested in the role of local government in tree disputes between neighbours, and the processes and learnings coming from the UK High Hedges legislation. The Neighbourhood Dispute Resolution (NDR) Act (www.neighbourhooddisputes.qld.gov.au) has recently commenced in my home state of Queensland. Although our NDR covers disputes about property damage, injury and loss of enjoyment, including obstruction of sunlight and pre-existing views, a separate Tribunal, with appointed, qualified Tree Assessors, are the decision makers, rather than local authorities.

Richard, David and I agreed that, like neighbourhood tree disputes, managing the risks, and minimizing the costs and liabilities of urban trees is now such a large part of managing trees in local streets and parks. Measuring and managing for optimal, and multiple benefits and values of urban trees is, therefore, critical to balancing such costs and liabilities.

In our subtropical city of Brisbane, we are currently focusing on the shade, cooling values of street trees to provide more comfortable and attractive pathways for walking and cycling . Our Neighbourhood Shadeways program is planting new shade trees along the most used, and most shade-hungry footpath spaces in the most shade-hungry of our residential suburbs. Based on detailed analysis of our street tree canopy cover, we are planting 10- 15,000 new street trees each year to move from the current 75% to 95% stocking level and the current 38% to 50% footpath shade tree cover by 2026.

Richard also traveled with me to meet with Peter Massini and the Greater London Authority’s urban greening staff, and Forestry Commission representatives, to learn more about the progress of the Lord Mayor’s Street Tree Planting project, and ReLeaf. It was good to compare our shade tree planting programs. As a strong advocate for summer tree shade cover, even in temperate climates, I couldn’t help but carry with me the sights of the avenues of pollarded limes along some streets in Croydon. With the need for pollarded wood long gone, it seemed to me that these trees were no longer delivering benefits anywhere near their maintenance costs.

Perhaps my obsession with shady trees in cities helped bring a little more sunshine and very mild September temperatures to London during my visit. Thank you again to LTOA for posting my interest to catch up with some LTOs. Thank you especially to Richard and David, for generously sharing their time and experiences with an Aussie urban forester.

Lyndal Plant

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