Green growth for expanding estate

PROPERTY developer Integra is celebrating a decade-long milestone.

With the suburb of Lucas established in 2011, the company has planted almost 10,000 trees with an average of 1000 placed in the ground per year.

Integra landscape manager Matthew Reynolds has overseen the tree planning effort since the beginning and said he still remembers how the estate looked when he started.

“It was a paddock with some sheep in it, and a huge amount of gorse you could just about see Dyson Drive from, so it’s definitely changed a lot,” he said.

“This has been a huge effort, not just by Integra but everyone involved, so our landscape architects through to our guys that plant the trees and maintain them.

“I think Lucas stands out from a lot of estates with how much planting we do, the environmental trails we put in and the environment that creates.”

Over 1300 trees will be added during the current planting season, which Mr Reynolds said is carried out by his six-person crew many of whom have been planting in Lucas since day one.

With three more parks, two wetlands and the Grange estate to be developed, it is estimated Lucas will have over 11,000 trees by its completion alongside over 160,000 plants and shrubs.

Integra’s director of land development Nick Grylewicz spent seven years developing Lucas’ masterplan and said it’s great to see the area growing strong.

“It’s amazing. We’ve never worked on a project that’s endured this long, and now we’re really seeing it come together,” he said.

“The trees we’ve planted are a characteristic of all our developments here. It does take time for them to establish, so we’re now starting to see that maturity.

“Often the eye goes onto the house, but here now it’s going onto the tree, and ours are designed to exceed the 40 per cent canopy cover for Ballarat so it’s quite an intensive program.”