We've sold our souls
Regarding the threat hanging over the 150-year-old Tettenhall Dick pear tree, which featured in your recent report speculating on the tree's future should the Shoulder of Mutton fall into the hands of property developers.
Regarding the threat hanging over the 150-year-old Tettenhall Dick pear tree, which featured in your recent report speculating on the tree's future should the Shoulder of Mutton fall into the hands of property developers.Well, we all know that even with a preservation order this tree's days would be numbered. The pathetic fines imposed by ineffectual courts would hardly deter developers from felling it, if it suited their profitability. No question.
In our increasingly philistinic society, trees are viewed as obstacles; nuisances, with their nasty, irritating habit of shedding all those leaves in autumn, and getting in the way of get-ahead folk shoehorning a third or fourth car on to their drives. They have to go.
Drive through any housing estate the length andÊbreadth of the land and you will see skips full of lawns, plants and foliage parked on drives in various stages of being block paved over or the even more dire pebble infill. The depressing result is that residential areas are slowly morphing into, and acquiring, the soulless feel of industrial estates.Ê
In most areas of Wolverhampton the life expectancy of any sapling planted on a public street can be measured in days, if not hours, thanks to the attention of bored, feral schoolchildren, and the ubiquitous yob underclass we are particularly well populated with.
All trees, particularly those decades, if not hundreds of years old, should be cherished and accorded high value. They soften and naturalise our sterile concreteÊworld.ÊÊ
I grew up in Hilton Street, Springfields, and recall the all too brief, but spectacular April display of the cherry blossom trees which were planted in the front gardens of the council houses. They have gone now, replaced by parking spaces.
I'm looking forward, however, to seeing the cherry blossom bloom in Japan next month, 9,000 miles from Hilton Street, and as we seem to edge increasingly towards treeless streets, the words of the Joni Mitchell song, something about going to a tree museum and not knowing what you've got till it's gone, come to mind.
Perhaps now would be a good time to pop up to Tettenhall and admire that old pear tree.
John Reed, Westering Parkway, Bushbury.
