Stop the chop: three trees

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My photo.

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Today at the horribly early hour of 7.30 am I joined a funeral for three healthy lime trees on a very handsome residential street in Falmouth. Today was to be the day they were chain-sawed and a variety of people were there to protest.

I’d heard about the event, made some enquiries and found confusion — some people thought the trees were diseased, some said they weren’t. It was something to do with the roots, some said.

Others opined that the people who owned the house right next to the trees were an ex-commissioner of Devon & Cornwall police and his wife who was something heraldic in the county. This caused more confusion: what did they have against trees? Were they arboriphobes? Maybe it was nothing to do with them? However someone had taken out Exemptions for tree-felling all along the road, with three of them directly threatened with felling today. (We’re talking about an Exemption from a Preservation Order.)

Allegedly, in 2021 there was a plan to prune some roots of the trees and sleeve others to stop them digging under the house. Why didn’t it happen? You do know that cutting down a tree often leads to heave and subsidence?

There were cops in a cop-car. There were Cormac men in their jaunty yellow jackets and helmets, putting up barriers. We stood around in the cold making wild guesses as to why Cornwall Council wouldn’t explain why the trees were getting the chop, despite the Mayor of Falmouth and at least one of the Cornwall councillors withdrawing their support for the chop.

I was firmly of the opinion that alien lizard men were behind it.

An Inspector turned up. Some protesters asked what had happened to the Ecological Report which should have been delivered last Friday. All street-trees staring at chainsaws must have an Ecological Report. Cornwall Council had said categorically that it existed. Where was it?

Apparently the ecologist was in the Bahamas.

There was some umming. Er… there was no Ecological Report as such. Without an Eco Report the three trees (now festooned with poetry and messages) could not be cut down.

The inspector said to the crowd that the trees would have a stay of execution while they looked into the Eco Report. Why had Cornwall Council said there was one when there wasn’t? Were they just incompetent or had alien reptiles nicked it. They would investigate.

I think they’ll find it hard because a strange pall of secrecy — sorry, confidentiality — has fallen across the matter of the three trees posing a ‘future potential nuisance’, as discussed at a Cornwall Council meeting.

There are still two weeks until the Exemptions run out so it’s all still to play for. Will chainsaws ring out at 2 am in the next few days? Or will three healthy sixty to a hundred-year-old trees get to continue treeing for another sixty years?

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