Tree "good" Man "bad" (From Malvern Gazette)

Tree "good" Man "bad"

10:59am Friday 9th November 2007

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Here we go again, another rash of missives from the hug-a-tree brigade who seem to think Tree "good," Man "bad."

Be the tree never so giant, incongruous, alien, invasive, damaging, detritus-dropping, mis-shapen, view-curtailing, and expensive to maintain (usually by the public purse and not, of course, themselves), they only seem to love it the more.

Nothing delights them better than to slap one of their fascist TPOs on somebody else's unwanted oppressive tree growth, which limits the delightful craft of horticulture with its stygian shade, but instead forces hours of leaf and needle raking plus unblocking of drains and gutters, awkward and dangerous of access. If there were justice in our tree laws, TPOers would be forced to do this at their expense for the duration.

Don't they realise civilization and agriculture only started when the primeval forests were cut back? Stonehenge was not built in a forest and neither was British Camp.

Fourteenth century William Langland saw "a fair field full of folk" from the Malvern Hills, but he wasn't up the top of one of present day Malvern's hundreds of giant Californian Redwoods. Langland's medieval England waxed prosperous on the wool trade of open downland sheep herding. Downlands unencumbered by the self-set scrubby bushes and black spot infested sycamores that the tree-huggers want to saddle us with for ever.

In its first heyday 100 years ago, nearly every house in Malvern Wells commanded that same magnificent view of the works of man and God combined, from almost Bristol to Birmingham.

Nowadays, you are lucky if you get more than a tantalising glimpse though the dense dull foliage of yew, pine or fir.

Those barren American redwoods (their ravenous grey squirrels came later) were misguidedly planted by the Victorians, when gloom was the latest groovy fad.

Imagine if we had planted our modern fad of a few years ago, the 4X4 Chelsea Tractor, bull-bar down in our gardens: they couldn't be more incongruous than a thuja in a cottage garden.

C R Cheeseman, Wells Road, Malvern.

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