"Sacha" wrote in message
"Rupert (W.Yorkshire)" wrote:
"Sacha" wrote in message

snip Why grow it at all, if only for personally selfish reasons?
Would
we grow
oaks to act as windbreaks, only to remove them to allow the
laurels
planted
inside them to take over? Trees are not animals in the sense of
allowing
them 'a few years of freedom'. Many trees live for a very, very
much
longer
time than any animal, including the human and IMO, should be
planted with
that in mind.


But we do grow most, if not all, things for selfish reasons.
Vegetables
don't stand a chance before they get noshed.
Taking your example to extremes we would never remove any
shrub,tree or
perennial or even a weed.
We manage our gardens and plots and as such we do interfere with
nature.
"Working with nature" -perhaps,maybe,sometimes but usually not.


I suppose I belong to the "plant trees for future generations"
school of
thought. And even though it's sometimes necessary, I feel real
sadness when
I see a tree being felled.

I'm generally of the same view as you Sacha. Some trees do have to go
sometimes but I get quite irritated when I see truly magnificent and
significant trees being felled when a bit of simple thought could
prevent it. This often applies to housing developments. A lovely tree
goes and in its place go in shoddy housing stock which would so easily
could have been given a slightly different configuration and the
whole development would ahve been vastly improved by leaving the tree
(shoddy building stock notwithstanding). The tree often goes simply
because of devoloper greed rather than any real need.

I could never plant a tree telling myself it's
just a temporary arrangement.

I do but then it's the weed trees that are sacrificial and they are
there for protection of the more significant trees which will come on
as the weed trees are culled. The other thing which we haven't yet
gotten around to doing is to plant firewood trees specifically for
culling or coppicing later - these will be Oz natives which grow like
weeds anyway.

We're getting some dieback in some of the
older trees in our garden, like the beeches, which is my favourite
tree. I
dread the day we're told any of them have to come down and hope most
sincerely I won't be around to see it happen!

I sympathise.