Why do they make lovely spring trees look so ugly?

Published: 14 April, 2011

• NOW should be a time when admiring the spring trees should make walking the streets a pleasure; a few well-grown cherries in flower can transform an area of indifferent housing into a charming environment.

Alas, in many of Camden’s streets the opposite transformation is taking place, so that pleasant terraced streets are made ugly by the appallingly crude lopping of the street trees. 

There are now only a few streets that one can look up without encountering an ugly sight of either recently hacked-off branches, or the inevitable result of hacking trees consisting of thickened fists with sprays of twigs sticking out.

Any elegance or aesthetic merit such trees had is thus compromised for years to come.

Even in open spaces, the deforming goes on, where there seems no logic behind it at all. 

A dreadful example is the triangle by Pancras Way- Wilmot Place where limes were drastically treated last year.

There are still fine trees left in Camden, but for how long? More and more often one comes across trees that have never been lopped before, newly mutilated.

Please anyone who feels the same as me, write to the New Journal to Camden’s tree officer and to the ward councillors concerned so that we can save the surviving arborial heritage from the chop.

CLARE SHANKS
Hadley Street
NW1