Today most people live in towns and cities, even in the developing countries, and the trees they see are the urban trees in the avenues, the parks and the gardens. There are often more trees and biodiversity in the urban areas than in the surrounding countryside with its ploughed fields and its fertilisers and insecticides. See the entry “Urban forests, urban forest fires, and urban forestry” in the book.

Unfortunately, there is an obsession in urban areas about pruning trees and cutting shrubs into squares, spheres and triangles. Gone is the traditional “English garden” with its free-flowing forms and its ambition to allow trees and shrubs as far as possible to grow as nature wants.  As a result, our urban forest is sometimes as noisy as an industrial estate, what with all the chain saws and other mechanical aids. All this cutting is not only noisy, but also “uglifying”. Of course there are cases when trees need to be pruned, but our tree “surgeons” go far beyond that. We plant tree species which grow big, when we actually want small trees, and so we periodically massacre the big trees, instead of planting species which grow less tall. If we also planted more evergreen species, there would be less noise from leaf-blowing in the autumn. In 1998 the architect Lord Rogers sad at a conference: “We must … stop the terrible pruning, when specimens are mercilessly hacked to pieces supposedly to fit in with the local scene”; and the arboriculturist Mike Lawson said: “We are on totally the wrong track … All we keep talking about is chainsaws. We need to put them to one side. We need to be concerned about the decline of the whole urban forest and doing something about it”. See the entries “Pruning, topping, pollarding and mutilation of trees” and “Small trees”.

Mikael Grut, 5.10.2014