Cartoon: John Sadler 

• A LITTLE dicky bird tells me that, according to Camden Council, trees are the new big threat to Hampstead Heath.

Apparently tree roots are causing the walls along the footbridge between Constantine and Savernake Roads to become dangerous, so Camden needs to repair them before the pesky elms start chucking bricks at us.

Surely they’ve got it the wrong way round?

It takes 20 to 30 years to grow a mature tree and just a couple of days to rebuild a wall. Why can’t they focus on important things like safeguarding the Heath’s most vital assets… trees?

This same area is still recovering from a ravaging last year, after Laurel and Hardy made another fine mess trying to prop up the same wall with metal poles and some sticky tape. What is the obsession with this wall? Is it listed or is Donald Trump on the council payroll?

It was bad enough that the City of London approved the so-called dam control that saw hundreds of life-giving trees felled for no reason. Now these big, beautiful, trees that have been standing tall for as long as I can remember are getting the chop. Their removal in order to retain a couple of visually insignificant low level brick walls is mindless.

The council says trees are dispensable and walls are important, I say: “fake news!”

Trees are essential to our ecosystem: they drink 500 gallons of water a day. They cannot be replaced with saplings that don’t have the sucking power. What’s the plan when the bridge floods (as one of the lowest part of the Heath) with no mature trees to take up the water? Build another wall or drain the swamp?

It is not a beautiful thing to ditch trees, birds, bees, flood defence, air quality and climate change just to build the wall. Don’t listen to Donald Trump. Listen to what Mother Nature and our birds are telling you Camden Council. It’s the reason we live here.

PS: Be good if the council could tell us the date of their community consultation – how did we miss it?

MRS NETS
Name and address supplied