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Country Matters February 2003
Weeping Willow trees on the Village GreenThe willows on the Village Green suffered from the high winds of 27th October 2002. One in particular suffered considerable damage. The Parish Council sought advice from a tree surgeon and the BDC Landscape Officer and as a result it was decided to pollard the two of the 40 year-old trees and fell the third.
Three years ago the Parish Council had the foresight to plant two weeping Silver Limes, Tilia petiolaris, that would replace the willows when they started to decline. These will make majestic trees and will be much longer lived than the willows. Now they are not overshadowed by the willows they should grow rapidly.
The story of why it took the Parish Council so long to carry out the pollarding would fill a book. Briefly, live power cables passed through the trees. After two months of numerous phone calls to 24Seven (the quickest time it took to connect to a real person was 22 minutes) and despite the clerk managing to get the matter logged as urgent it was not until January 2003 that we had a visit.
But before this visit because of the dangerous state of one of the willows and as the Christmas school holidays were approaching it was decided to remove the worst damage to one of the trees. Unfortunately a very small dead branch broke off and caused the power to short out. At last 24Seven excelled themselves a humanoid appeared, read the riot act to the tree surgeon, demanded to know why no permission had been sought to carry out the work, declared there was no record of the many phone calls, had reconnected the power and had disappeared all within 10 minutes.
To get back to the January meeting we at last met a human that was responsible for getting work done. In late January power was at last cut off, unfortunately not all users were notified by 24Seven and they had to suffer an un-notified daylong power cut. The badly damaged tree was felled to ground level as its roots were a part cause of the flooding on Shalford Road. The other two were pollarded and this should ensure they have many more years of life though both trees had the beginnings of heart rot in their main branches.
There is still no ending to this story in sight. 24Seven still claim that they never had any contact from the Parish Council and are still pursuing the contractor for not giving prior notice before starting work. British Telecom wires also passed through one of the trees. They finally responded to numerous phone calls some six weeks after the work was completed. The money, time and energy spent by everyone involved in this saga defies belief but in this era of mass communication it would be nice to actually meet and talk to a human being and hopefully resolve problems such as this.
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