About Hebden Arboriculture
The Story
Alex Hebden grew up in Somerset and has spent over 20 years working with trees, starting out as a climbing arborist in 2004 and eventually founding Hebden Arboriculture to bring a different kind of tree consultancy to the region he grew up in.
The career in between took him around the world. A year of climbing work in New Zealand was followed by a project in Sierra Leone training local people in safe tree felling and small-scale timber milling, and several trips to the Caribbean carrying out disaster relief tree clearance and safety work in the aftermath of severe weather events. That breadth of experience, across different climates, tree species, cultures, and high-pressure situations, shapes the way he approaches every survey.
The move into consultancy was a deliberate one. Working as an arborist across the same area over many years, Alex saw at first hand the lasting impact of poor quality advice: trees removed unnecessarily, work specified without real understanding, and reports produced to satisfy a process rather than genuinely inform a decision. Founding Hebden Arboriculture was an opportunity to do it properly.
The Approach
Trees are not problems to be managed. They are long-lived, highly adapted organisms that have been regulating ecosystems, sequestering carbon, and supporting biodiversity for far longer than human settlements have existed around them. Arboriculture, at its best, is simply the art of mediating between trees and people where their needs genuinely conflict.
That means looking at trees differently. Features that are sometimes treated as defects, cavities, deadwood, areas of decay, are often precisely the characteristics that make a tree most valuable to the ecosystem around it. A surveyor who understands this will not reach for a specification of unnecessary works simply because something looks unusual, or because a cautious recommendation feels like the safe option.
At Hebden Arboriculture, the aim is always to give clients an honest, informed picture of their trees, and to help them understand what those trees actually need, which is frequently less intervention than they have been led to expect.
Qualifications and Memberships
Alex holds a Level 4 Diploma in Arboriculture, the industry standard qualification for tree consultancy, and is a Technical Member of the Arboricultural Association. He is a Registered User of the Quantified Tree Risk Assessment (QTRA) method, a nationally recognised, standardised approach to tree risk assessment that balances the risks trees present against the very real benefits they provide, and benchmarks findings against HSE guidance on acceptable levels of risk.
The Commitment
Hebden Arboriculture is committed to retention wherever it is genuinely safe to do so. Whatever the survey type or context, the starting point is always finding a way to keep trees rather than a reason to remove them. Where work is recommended, it is because the evidence supports it, not because a cautious recommendation feels like the safer option. The aim is always to give clients an honest assessment they can rely on and act on.
When contractors are required, Hebden Arboriculture works only with tree surgeons who operate to the same standard and share the same approach. The industry default is not always the right answer, and the contractors Hebden Arboriculture works with understand that.