From mighty oaks to humble hazels, our sylvan treasures have never been more highly valued – or popular. As a record 10 million green-fingered Britons prepare to plant saplings, Michael McCarthy explores a root and branch revolution.
On the way to work tomorrow, as you hurry, head bowed, to the crowded bus-stop or station, or pause in the car at the red traffic light, feeling your blood pressure start to mount as you see that, on the other side of the junction, the traffic still isn't moving, do yourself a massive favour: look up.
What may swim into your line of sight is greenery. We've been without it for five months, do you realise? And now it's back. Those things called trees, those tall roadside posts that for the whole winter long you haven't glanced at, that have seemed no more than dark straggly alternative streetlamps without the lighting, have suddenly in the past 10 days sprouted life, and now, this week, are at their most intense.
For example, look at the horse chestnuts, the conker trees beloved of schoolboys, if you live in an area lucky enough to have them. Go on, look. Once you do, you'd have to have a soul made of concrete not be stirred, for right now, at least in southern Britain, the buds have just burst and the leaves have poured forth and they are of a quite spectacular colour. It's green, of course, but it's a special green, it is more than emerald, it is iridescent, as if the leaves were fresh-painted, as if they were glowing from the inside; and in the next few days they will be joined by giant upright white blossoms, big as a bunch of bananas, commonly known as Roman candles. The whole thing then looks like a living firework display, and it's free, and no streetlamp ever looked like this.
It's not just the horse chestnuts; cherry blossom and apple blossom is out now in gardens, as are the lilacs, and in hawthorn hedges there is a green mist of leaf wrapped around the branches. Greenery is bursting out everywhere on the trees in our towns and cities and suburbs, so much so that if you do look up from the slog to work and catch a glimpse of it, your soul will lift; and at last, at long, long last, someone has put a value on it.
It has a boring name (Capital Asset Value for Amenity Trees) and an acronym (CAVAT), but don't let that put you off; it's the thought that counts. Developed by the London Tree Officers' Association ( LTOA), the professional body for tree specialists working for the London boroughs, this is a system that, for the first time, assesses a tree's worth, according to its size, health, historical significance and how many people live near to enjoy it health club. It assesses worth in actual money terms; that's the point, in this age that worships cash enough to make heroes of hedge-fund managers.
The results, which were released this week, are surprising: most ordinary street trees that you might not give a second glance to (especially hurrying to work) turn out to be worth between £8,000 and £12,000, but for more special trees in more special places, even in the London suburbs, the values start to soar: an oak in Southgate, North London, for example, has been valued at £267,000 and a plane in Epping High Street at £200,000. At the top of the list, in Mayfair's Berkeley Square, yes, that urban oasis where the nightingale was meant to have sung (take it from me – it was a robin) there is a venerable plane tree on which the lads from the LTOA have stuck a value of £750,000. It has been there since Victorian times, but all the same – whew! you whistle – that's a lot of money for a trunk and some branches. There are dozens of others now valued at more than £500,000, too, in leafy and affluent boroughs such as Westminster, and Kensington and Chelsea.
The figures give people pause, they make them stop; and that's the point, that's why the system is needed, for in recent years, local authorities have been chopping down urban trees at such a rate of knots that the phrase "chainsaw massacre" has been applied to the process.
Behind it lurk those much criticised developments of the last quarter-century, the compensation culture, and the health-and-safety culture. There is no doubt that a big tree growing too near a building can, if it has a major root system, ultimately cause the building problems. It can become entangled in the foundations, and its thirst for water also leads to moisture being sucked from the ground, causing soil shrinkage and sinking buildings. (A mature deciduous growth can draw 50,000 litres of water a year from surrounding soil). Furthermore, there is no doubt that if a big old branch snaps off a big old tree it could hurt somebody.
Yet there is growing evidence that healthy mature trees are being felled by risk-averse insurers and councils because of the mere suspicion that they may affect neighbouring properties with subsidence, or fall on people.
In the past five years, London councils alone have chopped down almost 40,000 street trees, including some more than 100 years old. Some were aged, diseased or dying, but 40 per cent were removed because of insurance claims; yet a report commissioned by the London Assembly said that only 1 per cent of tree-removals were justified.
The picture is repeated nationwide, and was illustrated vividly in February in a report to the Department for Communities and Local Government, Trees in Towns II, which was the largest-ever survey of urban trees in England, covering streets, parks, schools, churchyards, allotments and private gardens in 147 towns and cities.
It found that, despite the key role they play in combating climate change, and creating pleasant environments (the report's own words), Britain's urban trees are under threat. Only 11 per cent of trees in towns are now between 50 and 100 years old, the survey discovered; only two per cent are more than 100 years old. That means: when they get big, they get chopped down. When the report was published, the Government put a gloss on it – "er, much has been done, but much remains to be done," and so on – but the Opposition got nearer the point.
Eric Pickles, the Shadow Communities and Local Government Secretary, warned that the leafy character of urban areas was under threat. "Whitehall's failure to tackle the compensation culture and the heavy-handed application of health and safety regulation is doing more harm than good," he said. "Trees have a vital role to play in tackling climate change and improving quality of life, yet Britain's leafy suburbs face a chainsaw massacre under Labour."
Tasty soundbite, eh? You can almost hear Mr Pickles's lips smacking as he uttered it. But even making substantial allowances for political point-scoring, it does seem likely that far, far too many urban trees are now coming down. The London Tree Officers' Association chairman, Andy Tipping, said that, too often, insurance companies facing a claim for subsidence were demanding that trees be destroyed, and councils were too willing to cave in to their demands.
The new CAVAT system his association has drawn up will change things, he hopes, because in future the high value of trees – in London alone the total value of them is now estimated at £6.4bn – will demand extra engineering work by insurers to prove a link between a tree and subsidence, not least because various other causes, from broken drains to drought, can be behind buildings getting that wonky look. The higher the tree's value, the more proof insurers will need that it is really causing problems before they can chop it down. It is planned to roll the system out nationwide next year.
"Often an insurer will point the finger at the tree, it is chopped down and then subsidence problems in a house persist," said Tipping, a tree officer in Barnet, north London. "Companies pay out vast sums repairing buildings and then, some months later, new cracks appear. Under the new scheme, there will be more on-site investigations to find the source of damage at the beginning of a claim."
He said that in one case he was asked to remove a 130-year-old oak that was three houses away from a property with subsidence, and there were no roots near to it. "It's an absurd situation," he said. "People still don't understand that subsidence is a problem of buildings, not trees. In many cases, trees are not the main culprit. It's other reasons instead such as Victorian drains, poorly installed double-glazing, or climate change."
The other reason for not removing them, of course, is that people love trees. Research published yesterday suggests that almost 10 million people intend to plant a tree in their garden this year. (Won't that get the insurers worried?) When trees are cut down in towns and cities, nearly always by some overweening authoritarian body, like a council, or a railway company, local people often protest vigorously: they suddenly realise they are actually very fond of what they had always taken for granted.
Why do we love trees? We can think of many practical reasons – the wood, the shade, the shelter, the apples, the pears – but there are deeper reasons too. Beauty is obviously one. The horse chestnuts in young leaf this week are so striking that they pull you up short, as are the blossoming cherries, reminding us of the opening of AE Housman's famous lyric: "Loveliest of trees, the cherry, now/ Is hung with bloom along the bough/ And stands about the woodland ride/ Wearing white for Eastertide."
It isn't only trees in spring blossom that move us; trees in autumn colours are another still-life firework display; indeed, the basis of a whole tourist industry in New England, where the hordes of visitors who come to look at the fall foliage are known as "leaf peepers". Even trees in high summer, the least interesting part of the period in leaf, can provide a spectacle, such as the beeches of the woodlands of the Chilterns, whose tall, straight trunks, combined with the light falling between them, give the appearance of leafy cathedrals.
Yet perhaps there is something even beyond beauty in our attachment to the oak and the ash, the lime and the hornbeam, the yew and the Scots pine. In the last 20 years the new discipline of evolutionary psychology has made many suggestive interpretations of the origins of human feeling, taking them back to our distant ancestors; the rationale is that we have been office workers for four generations, and we were farmers for about 400 generations; but before farming, we were hunter-gatherers for 20,000 generations or more, and much of our genetic make up must have been constructed then.
There's no proof of this, of course; there can only be suggestions, but they are powerful ones (why do all children like to hide? Because the children who didn't hide, when the predators or the attackers came, didn't survive to pass on their genes). health club Is there perhaps something in us that goes far, far back, to account for our love of trees, something more than beauty or utility? Some deeper attachment formed during the aeons when we lived in the forest?
It's fanciful, of course it is, especially now most of us only have the street, the house, or the block of flats; and we can never know. But we do know that when the trees that grace our street, our road, our courtyard, are threatened with toppling, we do not like it one bit. At least now there is a system, thanks to the London Tree Officers' Association – that gives tree-lovers a chance to fight back when the insurance company or the council sends someone with a chainsaw.
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