Jack Crawford

Jack is an arboricultural consultant and freelance climbing arborist with around twenty years in the trade — practical work first, climbing, pruning and dismantling, before moving into surveying and consultancy. He holds a BSc (Hons) in Arboriculture and Urban Forestry, awarded First Class, a National Diploma in Arboriculture and Urban Forestry, and a Foundation Degree in Wildlife Management and Conservation.

He gained experience at WSP working as an arboricultural consultant on large-scale energy projects, building much of his BS5837 reporting experience there, and has deep roots in Scotland's Central Belt — eight years living and working there, with a consultancy network still centred on Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The core of that is BS5837:2012 tree surveys, Arboricultural Impact Assessments, Tree Constraints Plans and Arboricultural Method Statements for planning work — technical work runs through QGIS, CAD and DXF, georeferenced crown and root-protection-area mapping rather than a tape measure and a guess. The wider toolkit also covers BS3998:2010 and Visual Tree Assessment for tree health, condition and risk, tree-safety planning for film and television productions, and hands-on climbing, pruning and dismantling work.

Right now, Mind the Trees is only taking on BS5837 survey instructions. Tree health and risk assessments, film & TV tree safety, and climbing work all draw on real experience, but they aren't something Jack can currently deliver to a reliable standard while based abroad, so they're being held back rather than offered and risking letting a client down. They'll be added back to the list as capacity returns — for climbing specifically, once Jack is back in the UK.

Jack is currently spending a period doing agroforestry field research on farms across New Zealand, looking at how tree management knowledge — pruning, risk, long-term stand management — translates onto working agricultural land. That research is producing a growing set of articles and field notes, kept deliberately separate from the consultancy side of this site for now, but built from the same underlying conviction: that trees are long-term infrastructure, worth managing properly rather than as an afterthought.

Mind the Trees operates as Mind the Trees Ltd.