DHE, MArborA, MCIHort, Tech Cert(ArborA)
Patrick has over 40 years experience working in the arboricultural and horticultural sectors. His initial interests were in commercial horticulture where he had planned to have his own nursery. This prompted him to study commercial horticulture. Following that course he took up a post as town gardener in a small town in Ireland called Carrick on Suir. During his time working there he took time out to work on a nursery in Germany, where he gained experience digging up trees for dispatch. The main skill gained was preparing root balls.
With a need to gain further knowledge in amenity horticulture he travelled to Edinburgh in 1984 to study amenity horticulture at the Royal Botanic Gardens. The 3 years he spent there gave him valuable experience in plant knowledge and maintenance as most of the time was spent working in the various departments. And one of those departments was the Arboretum where he learnt how to climb trees and use chainsaws among other things.
So in 1987 he had a desire gain more experience as an arborist and travelled to London to work for Brent Council. That was two weeks before the 1987 storm so he had lots of experience in removing fallen trees from cars and houses. He continued his work as an arborist for Harrow Council before moving to officer role for London Borough of Enfield,where his main remit was the rehabilitation of the landscape following the storm damage in 1987. In 1993 he moved to the City of Westminster where he spent 6 months in the planning department before taking up a post in the Housing Department. Before moving to housing one of his projects was managing an outbreak of Brown Tail Moth on rosaceous trees.
Patrick worked in the Housing Department for 10 years where he managed the grounds maintenance as well as the tree stock. He managed contracts and contractors for both elements and oversaw many landscape projects, which were valued by the residents. Following his time there he returned to Harrow to take up the role of the Arboricultural Operations Manager. Over his 10 years working for the London Borough of Harrow he was responsible for managing all the public owned trees in the Borough. He was responsible for introducing Ezytreev as a tree management software and over the following years got all the trees surveyed and risk assessed for the first time. He also organised the planting of 1000s of trees over the period including many 100s paid for by grants from the then London Mayor.
In 2014 Patrick left Harrow following one of the many restructuring processes and decided to set up his own tree consulting business by creating Bucks Plant Care Ltd. One area that he lacked experience was in Planning and dealing with development applications and protected tree works so he took up a job share post with Cherwell Council for 3 years. Among the many projects he was involved in was the re-surveying of Area Tree Preservation Orders.
Six years ago he invested in Keysoft Solutions Keytree software, which sits on CAD, to process tree surveys and produce tree constraints, impact assessment and tree protection plans. This has enabled him to work with architects and turn around reports in good time as well as producing well defined plans to enable planning applications to gain approval. He has also utilised he knowledge of CAD to produce landscape design plans to discharge landscape planning conditions.
Qualifications:
Professional membership
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