Magnolia – photograph by Liz Mathews
London is a green city. Indeed, parts of it are now classified as an ‘urban forest’. The combination of parks, street trees and many gardens (including roof-gardens) makes it one of the greenest of all ancient cities. Most Londoners meet a tree or two every day, many of us are lucky enough to see dozens of them out of the windows. As David Constantine puts it in his poem Birdsong:
We think our common road a choir of trees.
There are tree-cultish books, not aimed at much-derided tree-huggers, directing people to the remarkable trees of various areas. Everyone has their own favourites; the giant planes of Brunswick Square, which survived the wartime destruction of most of the surrounding buildings (perhaps protected by the charm of Handel’s aria composed in their praise); the magnolias on St. Mary-le-Strand’s precarious island mid-Aldwych; the parade of blossom on one ordinary residential street or the elegant chestnut avenue along another.
Trees don’t live forever, and they need some looking after. Councils also have to protect them from the philistines who are afraid of trees and see them only as nuisances that make shade, block gutters, shelter birds – which are also perceived as nuisances – raise their roots and have a sinister urge to crush or poison people unless they are felled or poisoned first. (Perhaps this is the last remnant of an early anti-pagan representation of sacred trees as harbouring malign deities?)
Pro-tree neighbours periodically have to link hands around a threatened tree to protect it from illegal destruction, but this support is sometimes taken to extremes; our local tree-surgeon told me that he’s often abused as a ‘murderer’ by wrathful passers-by if he has to fell a rotten or dangerous tree. But the worst threat is still building. Eighty years ago, Charlotte Mew wrote her searing lament The Trees are Down – so not much changes.
They are cutting down the great plane trees at the end of the gardens…
It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade today;
These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem:
When the men with the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas’ have carted the whole of the whispering loveliness away
Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.
It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes;
Half of my life has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,
In the March wind, the May breeze,
In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas.
There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;
They must have heard the sparrows flying,
And the small creeping creatures in the earth when they were lying –
But I, all day I heard an angel crying:
‘Hurt not the trees.’
As this poem makes so clear, trees are free, for everyone; their beauty makes a place which people feel is home.
The pastoral ideal of a sylvan grove has a long pedigree in English, and its transfer to the urban environment seems an essential element of its 21stC survival. (These trees shall be my books…) In this romantic spirit, I was pleased to encounter our local ‘urban forester’, an Ent-like tree-keeper, I imagined, a contemporary wood-warden. But, having been in contact with him, I’m less thrilled to discover that in Islington, hitherto one of the greenest boroughs, tree-planting – like everything else – will be cut in future. So, although the two missing trees from our street-corner spinney may yet be replaced, because residents have asked for them, such re-planting won’t happen again.
Just as government-owned rural ancient woodland will vanish when it’s sold off, so the urban forest will inevitably shrink, if the trees are not cared for or re-planted. According to the Ents, the benefits of city trees include (but are not limited to) the fact that they: filter airborne dust and pollution, increase air quality, absorb traffic noise, reduce temperature extremes, generate breezes, provide shade, increase privacy, give food and nesting sites for birds and insects, improve quality of life, reduce stress, give proven psychological and health benefits, increase local property values [!], help prevent flooding.
So, if we want to continue being able to live in a green city, we must protect our trees even more carefully than we do already. This piecemeal destruction of ‘forests’ close to home is yet another unnecessary imposition, presented as inevitable among far worse cuts, just a very minor item on the agenda. But, as Philip Pullman made clear in his superb lyrical speech against library closures, these false dichotomies and competitions for funds are merely a tactic of ‘divide and rule’; there is no need to choose between such extremes. It’s just another small, important, thing to add to the list of unacceptable losses against which we will be protesting at the demonstration on March 26th.
Words in company 