Leave the trees alone
SHEFFIELD council is preparing to chop down the city’s favourite tree and local campaigners, who have been fighting this and similar actions elsewhere in the city for months, are none too happy.
The 120-year-old Huntingdon Elm in the Nether Edge is one of only four known mature elms in the city to survive Dutch elm disease and is believed to possess resistance to the disease, but now, it—and the threatened white-letter hairstreak butterfly it supports —will fall prey to the even more lethal health-and-safety experts.
The news follows a scene out of ‘Putin’s Russia’ in November, according to former MP Nick Clegg, as Sheffield council contractors descended on a Hallam street under cover of darkness and ‘dragged’ people out of bed to move their cars so they could chop down eight trees; some protestors were arrested and the council apologised.
Then there’s a dispute over the Rivelin Valley Road, ‘a Sheffield landmark’ and, at 31 ∕2 miles long, the second longest avenue of limes in the UK, with 700 majestic trees that are more than 100 years old; the council wants to remove 31 of them, claiming that the roots might be damaged when the road is resurfaced. A petition at www.change.org, called ‘Save the trees on Rivelin Valley Road’, has already reached nearly 6,000 signatures.