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Someone cut down the cypress trees in the cemetery.
Now someone has pruned the wisteria which adorned the main square and the railings of the old school building.
UPDATE May 2012: I have to admit I was too hasty in my judgement. I have added another photo (second below) to show the pruning did no harm, it may in fact have been the right thing to do. Apologies! Mea culpa.
This was one of the great beauty spots of the village, which always aroused the admiration of visitors and residents alike. Everyone took photographs of the wisteria in bloom (it was a variety which bloomed three times a year).
May 2012
My experience of this kind of destructiveness is that it is more sophisticated than vandalism - intentional and not mindless. As it becomes better known in an area that people treasure the beauty of a local park's flower beds, trees and shrubs, a tiny minority may deliberately and sometimes quite ingeniously mutilate these things, by, for instance, neatly debarking mature trees so that they die quite slowly. This torturous depravity arose from schism within our neighbourhood. They were expressions of hatred which many were ready to reciprocate. "An enemy has done this thing' is a phrase that passed through my mind when especially depressed by harm done to flora and fauna directed at my neighbours by people who'd decided this was a way to send a defiant message. We had to decode and respond to this with something other than frustrated rage - some brave blend of thought and care. Not easy when you are so angry. The problem in my area of inner city Birmingham has been largely eliminated, less by better gardening or security; more by greater stewardship across the board - education, social care, employment policies, policing, voluntarism, deeper involvement and wider participation in decisions that affect the area and its population.
ReplyDeleteI should have added Jim that this is a classic result of conflict between conservationists and and Lopachkin type developers "If you resist or refuse me planning permission I'll chop down your cherry orchard anyway...":
ReplyDeleteWho knows? Half the village is up in arms.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of the wisteria, it could be the result of unauthorised and aggressive pruning.