ruined trees

This once-handsome tree has been butchered by a brutal process known as topping. It's a form of 'pruning' that's all too common in Ireland, the country with the fewest trees in Europe. There are so few properly qualified tree surgeons in the country that total charlatans are entrusted with the job of making trees a little ‘neater’. The one pictured above is in a neighbour’s garden here in Chapelizod. It was for many years a most handsome, mature tree. Now for reasons that eternally elude me, its beauty has been raped by this most ugly deformation. Moreover, its chances of survival have also been curtailed: it is now much more likely to become diseased. It will also need more maintenance rather than less. All over Dublin and indeed Ireland we see this awful treatment of trees. Simply on aesthetic grounds it is unacceptable, but for a whole host of environmental reasons it is criminal. They say the Irish are visually illiterate – a point so obvious to any visitor here it hardly needs repeating – but this disregard for trees seems to me to indicate a deeper dysfunction in this strange, often wilful society. To single out only the Irish for blame is unfair, however (for all that the shortage of trees in Ireland and the widespread incompetence in their pruning makes it a greater problem than in other countries): even a casual amble along the Thames embankment in London reveals whole rows of mutilated trees, the work, presumably, of London council. See the excellent website http://66.165.117.218/topping.asp for a detailed discussion of what they describe as 'perhaps the most harmful tree pruning practice known'.