To the Editors,
When we first moved into our Caledonia home over three decades ago, in a strip along the full length of our side street ran a row of mature trees. In the centre of these rose the most magnificent sugar maple, which in the autumn would tower like a great orange sun above them all.
One morning, a few short years later, I awoke to the sound of chain saws roaring behind our house. Gazing out from a second floor window I watched in despair as a work crew relentlessly dismembered and ground up the orange sun giant until it was gone; nothing but the barest stump to mark that it had ever been there. The story was one that was to become all too familiar over the coming years; age and disease had weakened it until it was determined to be unsafe left as it was and so needed to come down.
I listened to and watched the same scene repeated again and again as, one by one, the sheltering greenery around all sides of our picturesque historic square vanished. Eventually, the entire row of trees had disappeared, save for three that still bordered our house, until the day arrived when crews began paving over the remains of the rocky strip, widening the roadway and bringing asphalt down to the very edge of our first tree. Not long after that we saw this first tree begin deteriorating as well, eventually being deemed unsafe itself and thus sealing its fate.
And then there were two.
Finally this week I discovered a notice hanging on our front door announcing that the tree overhanging our front yard had been marked for removal. I knew the number of large branches dropped over the past few years made this day inevitable, yet still there is always a degree of shock and sadness when the end finally does arrive.
I have watched a picture perfect Magnolia, whose spectacular springtime display could not save it, disappear when its roots invaded buried pipes. And a giant riverside oak, an entire community of birds flitting about within it, along with insects that never neared the ground, swarming each evening seven storeys above the ground below, until it too was brought down.
One of the greatest appeals to living in older neighbourhoods, whether in rural towns or major cities, is the comforting shelter of their tree canopies. And whether our trees are valued individually for their shade, their aesthetics, or even their ecological value, collectively they serve to mute the starkness of our residential areas and in traditional neighbourhoods they paint a relaxing canvas that can and never will be replicated within endless tracts of minuscule frontages and absent backyards. We need to realize that we have incomparable gifts in our trees, but they are not ones that can last forever. And before their losses become irreversible we need to work towards, through both groups and our elected officials, to not just preserving, but restoring these most valuable of treasures.
Robert Sorrell,
Caledonia
