Trees
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Introduction |
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| First Letter to Council
Assistant Area Housing Manager XXXXXXX Council 8 December 1994 Dear Sir, Damage to Landscaped Area at xxxxxxxxxxxx Street I refer to correspondence with your department in 1992, which began as a result of a complaint by a neighbour about my son (then aged 4) pulling leaves off trees in the landscaped area in xxxxxxx Street. I am as aware as anybody about the environment in which I live, and I wrote to you later about a number of things, including vehicles speeding in the street, obstructive on-street parking, and other matters - I have heard nothing from you since. I have, however, ensured that my son has not further damaged landscaped areas. I now wonder why I bothered, because two weeks ago, a squad, who I presumed to be working on your behalf, carried out "management" of the landscaping to the rear of my house (that is, at the entrance to the street when turning off the main road. This "management" comprised chainsawing all of the fine mature trees to ground level, and leaving four or five of the straggliest-looking shapeless offshoots sticking out of the ground. The lost trees included a birch and a sycamore, and several others whose species I do not know - these had grown to perhaps 15 feet or so, and were about 15 years old. These trees were, admittedly, a bit overgrown, and I had previously removed odd branches overhanging the garden. I would suggest that this situation had probably arisen because I had never seen the Corporation touch or trim them in all of the time I have lived here. In view of your earlier complaint about my son, and your ignoring my later letter to you, I find it difficult to formulate a polite letter about this matter. I therefore write to ask if the Council's landscaping policy is to protect half-dead twigs tied to stakes from ravaging 4 year-olds, while unleashing 40-year-olds with chainsaws on anything which actually looks like growing to a reasonable size. I am not a "green" person, but feel outraged at the effect of this so-called "landscape management", which can never be reversed. I want to know why this happened, and what measures you propose to take to restore the situation (even if in the long term). I also want to know if it is coincidental that the cable TV contractors have excavated in this area since the trees were removed. I also still want know what is to be done about on-street (and on-pavement) parking in this street, which was exacerbated, prior to my writing to you before, by road improvement works carried out by the Council. Please write to me soon about these matters. Yours faithfully, 
The Council then replied and said that they thought that I was happy with the way things had been handled before. They said they had no interest in neighbour disputes. They said that the work to the trees had been "routine thinning of a thicket." They said that most of the trees had been dead anyway. It was at this stage that I cracked. I replied: |
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| The Second Letter
xxxxxxx Council Ground Maintenance Department 20 February 1995 Dear Sirs, Damage to Landscaped Area at xxxxx Street I am sorry that I have not been able to write to you since my previous letter but I have been absolutely knackered as a result of raking up a 2 foot layer of leaves from my garden. I suppose that these leaves fell off the trees which used to abut my garden fence, but I have to admit I wasn't watching all the time because I kept looking round to see if the postman was bringing me a reply to my last letter to the Council, 3 years ago. The leaves fall off every year, and, not being an expert gardener, I always think that this means that the trees are dead, but no, every spring they seem to revive and grow more leaves for me to rake up the following autumn. I have done so much raking that I almost have started to think that the trees are mine, since nobody else has given the trees any maintenance attention since I moved here. Anyway, I got a book out of the library, and, apparently, there are some trees whose leaves fall off every winter, so that they look dead! Isn't nature amazing! It was a good book, and I could certainly recommend it, because it said that birch and sycamore come into this category, just to trick the unwary. This probably explains why I have three bags of birch and sycamore leaves, raked up this winter. Incidentally, I would like to keep these leaves for sentimental reasons, but they are yours, so you can have them back if you want. It's a pity that you didn't cut your "dead" trees down a couple of weeks earlier, before all the leaves fell off, because then I could have been saved all this raking. Then again, if the trees had still had their leaves on, they wouldn't have looked dead, so they might have survived, eh? Still, to look on the bright side, at least this autumn I can have a day off, because there won't be any leaves to rake up. I might use this day to indulge in an orgy of watching cable TV, which, fortunately, I can now have installed dead easily, since the cables were laid where the trees used to be. For example, I might decide to watch an all-day feast of sport, although I would be hard-pushed to find a more enthralling and memorable sports experience than the boxing battle the other night between Frank Bruno and that other guy (you know, the one with the glass jaw and the cauliflower bum). I haven't seen a fight like it since 1963, when my granny whacked my auntie with her message bag for nicking her bingo money. She broke three bones in her corsets, and irreparably damaged her liver and kidneys. Fortunately, her sausages and stew were in the other bag, so at least we didn't starve. She got granny back after tea-time, though, by gubbing her over the head with an ashtray, which my uncle had made by hollowing out a curling stone. She knocked all her teeth out, so, as you can imagine, there was some mess, with bits of pink and white plastic everywhere. So sport for all I say, and plenty of it. Not much fun if you are a tree, though. Still, I don't suppose trees watch much sport. I can also look forward with barely-controllable relish to the half-dead high-amenity scrubbery, which nobody could see before, coming into its own, blossoming and bearing its fruit all along my fence line, helping to turn my neighbourhood into the green and pleasant land which could all so easily become overshadowed by ugly big nasty trees. It's a good job nobody ever landscaped Canada, since those huge horrible Sequoia would be in for a shock, eh? It would also help if you could come back and dig out the six remaining stumps, since people are now able to cut through this strip and climb my fence to avoid walking all the way round. They seem to keep tripping over the stumps in the dark, sometimes breaking an ankle, and the screaming wakes the kids, and I am fed up going out in the middle of the night to end their misery by hitting them over the head with a shovel. They are (mostly) low-amenity people, so their demise leaves the remaining high-amenity people to form a better society, so you could say that's a bonus. I was going to write a poem to "That's Life" because Esther likes poems and men with willies shaped like turnips (or is it the other way round?), although it was never quite the same after dear old Cyril Fletcher stopped writing his "Odd Odes", was it? Anyway, in the finest Cyril tradition, I attach a small ode dedicated to trees in general, and to "Incapability Brown", the well known landscape bodger. I have written this on recycled paper, since there are so few trees about these days, and you can't risk using fresh stuff. In fact, I pulped your previous letter and used that, so if you hang this letter on a nail in your downstairs toilet, the cycle will be complete. You might be wondering by this time what the point of this letter is, and the answer is that I have shown your previous letter to various friends, relatives, etc, and, well, laugh? LAUGH? - we all laughed till we cried. We all think that your "explanation" about high-amenity trees and low-amenity trees, routine thinning, etc, ranks alongside the best that Monty Python could ever offer - "Dead tree, sir? - No, sir, it's not dead, it's merely a low-amenity pine from the fjords." Or "I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK - we cut down trees, we eat our lunch, we like to press wild flowers" The best joke of all is that the real answer is so obvious, i.e. the "coincidental" laying of TV cables, yet you can script an explanation that denies this - and you wrote it so deadpan - absolutely brilliant! It's the way you tell them. Your sense of humour is obviously lost on the general public, so I thought that Mr XXXXXXXX, the Council's chairman, might like to share our wee joke, so I have sent him a copy of our correspondence. Maybe if he sees the joke, he won't mind if I share it through various local newspapers, etc, with the rest of the local population. Who knows, I might even get on the telly? Any old how, I have to go because one of the other patients wants to use the crayon. Oh, did you know that "Ground Maintenance" is an exact anagram of "MAN CAN UNDO TREEING" or "CON AMENDING NATURE"? Good eh? Yours faithfully, And the Poem that was attached? Here it is: To a Tree (dedicated to Incapability Brown) Not last month but the month before, these tree fellers came to the door. One had a chainsaw, one had an axe, and the third one worked the radio and went for all the snacks. They had finished all their training, and read all the safety regs, and had learned to tell the difference between trees and arms and legs. So they put on all their safety gear, their goggles, gloves and boots, and cut down all the big trees, and trampled on the shoots. The boss had been round earlier, and picked the trees to go. The big trees got the shove, cause "their amenity was low. Wee bushes are much nicer, but they don't grow like they ought ter, cause the big trees are just bullies, and they soak up all the water." 
But some were dead, we didn't cut down any living trees."yet I go into my garden, and there's leaves up to my knees. They must have come from others, half a mile along the street, and flown against the wind, or maybe stuck to peoples' feet. And in the same week, just by chance, a squad laying TV cable dug a trench right through the middle, just as fast as they were able. Its funny how tree maintenance came just at that same time when they hadn't seen a secateur since 1979. Twenty years they took to grow, and cut down with a stroke, and carted off for firewood, it's enough to make you boak. And there's no point writing in to get a decent explanation, because they canny afford postage stamps down at the Corporation. They try to say that this is "routine thinning of a thicket." If they think I can believe that, I can tell them where to stick it. The moral of the story is, if you fancy climbing higher, keep your head below the bushes or you'll end up in the fire. |
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| The Result?
I handed that letter in to their office at lunch time that day, with another envelope addressed to the Chairman of the Council (although it had a perfectly polite and reasonable request in it, they didn't know that!) I had an officer at the door at 8:00am the following morning, apologising profusley for the lack of consultation, their delay in replying etc, and assuring me that the area would regenerate and restore the privacy I had before. It did! 
 to go back to the "Favourite Letters" page |
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The Council had written to me, at the behest of a grumpy neighbour who had seen my 4-year-old pulling leaves off a bush. At first I was suitably contrite. I waited 3 years, then the Council boobed - read on...