The tree, today’s most political of plants
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If man is by nature a political animal, is a tree now a political plant? The voters in the local elections in Plymouth seemed to think so. In March of this year, 110 trees along Armada Way, a major avenue leading from the sea to the city centre, were felled in the middle of the night ahead of a redevelopment of the area.
Last Thursday, the Conservatives, who had been in control of Plymouth City Council and had given the go-ahead for the felling, lost almost every single seat they contested. Local MP Johnny Mercer conceded that the anger over the felling was part of the reason. Trees equated to votes.
These weren’t even particularly historic trees. Most were planted in the 1980s on what was previously a long lawn with a road on either side. They were an artifice of nature, which may be why the council, 40 years on, thought that the sentimentality wouldn’t run too deep when they decided the boulevard needed an update. Within that lies a fundamental misunderstanding of how the public perceives trees.
Humans exaggerate some things and diminish others. I am fairly sure that if you asked any citizen if they thought there were enough trees locally, most — though not those whose houses are subsiding due to root ingress — would say “no, we need more”.
Trees in cities are not, however, rare things. In fact, cities have some of the best tree coverage around. London is a forest of sorts, 21 per cent of it is tree canopy; the National Forest Inventory has a threshold for a forest being 20 per cent (but without the tarmac obviously). The capital is doing better than the country in general, which is stuck stubbornly at 13 per cent tree coverage, and is leafier than counties such as Lincolnshire.
But the bulk of brick and concrete outweighs them in the mind, and so the importance of each tree as a connection to nature is magnified. There are a few “remnant” trees around, which a city builds around, but most in the past 200 years have been carefully placed by a city planner to evoke just this. And most, if felled, would be replaced.
The other falsehood — of which I am sure many a protester is not consciously guilty — is that a tree is a status symbol. Many of the battles fought have been in residential areas. Trees make their locale better: cleaner air, visually more appealing and even reduce crime, according to some research. But they also make the residents richer, passively.
Study after study has shown why an estate agent will use the term “leafy” whenever possible to describe a district. Doug Kelbaugh, the late US architecture professor, put the uplift value at $7,000 for the house being marketed, and $2,000 for its neighbours. Another study in Athens, Georgia, by Anderson and Cordell showed a 3-5 per cent uplift in values.
Residents, from the streets of Sheffield — where they agreed to the felling and replacement of 17,500 street trees — to pop-up tree protests all over London, have an intrinsic sense that they lose something of value to them when the trees come down.
Trees are a running cost on a council’s balance sheet — some really do need to come down for safety reasons — but also an asset that can’t be realised. It is possible to value a tree: the London tree officers using their Capital Asset Value for Amenity Trees method (CAVAT) gave one particularly fine plane tree in a north London churchyard a pricetag of £1.6mn recently.
But what if the numbers don’t add up? In Haringey, the council erected a scaffolding fortress, again at night, around a 120-year-old plane tree that needed to be removed. It was causing subsidence to neighbouring houses. The council suspected local activists might climb the plane, so they also installed 16 security guards to guard the tree. Would it have been easier to pay the £400,000 subsidence bill instead?
But not everything has a trade-off price. We can evaluate trees for biodiversity, city cooling, the pleasure they give people, and even house prices. They win votes when you promise to plant more and lose them when they come down.
But their importance in a city landscape is as a counterweight to power itself. Trees’ stubborn refusal to get out of the way when a new development is required means they are loved by citizens who see something of themselves in them. That some living things predate us and will outlast us is a powerful notion for us humans.
It isn’t a resistance to change that makes people bridle at tree felling. People do like change. But mostly they like a change of authority when those in power don’t recognise their own ephemerality in the greater order of things.
Follow Joy on Twitter @joy_lo_dico
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