Axe the town hall vandals who fell much-loved trees, says PATRICK O'FLYNN

The British public love their trees. And not just trees in general, and not in a merely theoretical way either. For many of us, particular lines of trees that have stood for decades have come to be regarded as old and dear friends, marking out and softening the terrain we call home.

The great Victorian lyricist of the natural world, Gerard Manley Hopkins, captured this emotion in his poem Binsey Poplars, about the felling of trees by a local authority in Oxfordshire in 1879.

“My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled/Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun/All felled, felled, are all felled... Not spared, not one,” wrote the devastated poet.

Nearly a century and a half later, municipal Britain is very much still in the grip of planners who refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of this emotional connection felt by so many people towards mature trees.

So it should not surprise us that Plymouth Council cynically chose the hours of darkness to begin a project to reshape Armada Way, a key city-centre space.

The scheme involved felling more than 100 mature trees despite massive opposition to make way for the pet vision of a small cohort of councillors and officials, albeit including the planting of a similar number of new, semi-mature trees.

An emergency court injunction obtained by a local environmental group has temporarily spared a very few of the original trees but Armada Way is now largely a scalped wasteland.

One outraged local MP has described the scene as looking “like part of the Amazon after deforestation”. Perhaps a few decades into the future, when we are long gone, a new generation of Plymouth residents will have grown to love the remodelled space.

But no doubt some self-important council big-wigs will then once more decide they have better ideas and desecrate the avenue again. What has happened in Plymouth is by no means an isolated incident.

A report has just been published about the great “Sheffield Chainsaw Massacre”, documenting the needless destruction of thousands of mature trees by that city’s council.

And in Haringey, north London, residents organised round-the-clock protection for a particular London plane tree for more than a year.

That too has now been fenced off and lined up for the executioner’s axe because it is alleged by insurers to be contributing to nearby subsidence.

Far too often councils opt to fold straight away and cut trees down amid a fear of being hit by compensation claims. This is a frankly unbalanced approach that may satisfy the bean-counters but doesn’t weigh the love felt by residents in the ledger of profit and loss.

Neither does it take account of the health benefits, particularly proven mental health benefits, that a familiar green canopy can bestow.

As the author Holly Worton, aka “the tree whisperer”, puts it: “You may have to slow down and quiet your mind so you can listen to the often-subtle messages that trees send us, you may find yourself experiencing lower stress levels and increased well-being.”

A British author from a previous era, JRR Tolkien, also understood the spiritual power of the most mature trees, which have been around for longer than the lifespan of any human.

His character Treebeard is described in one of his novels as “the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun upon this Middle Earth” and plays a decisive role in defeating dark forces hostile to the natural world.

It would be overdoing it to rank the ruling group on Plymouth Council and their officials alongside Tolkien’s orcs.

They – the councillors – are convinced their new scheme will, in due course, benefit locals and be better protected against anti-social behaviour.

But once 16,000 local people had signed a petition in favour of preserving existing trees and they in return had agreed to “meaningful engagement”, they should not have sent in chainsaw crews unannounced. That was sneaky and disgraceful.

They should also have found room for some emotional intelligence to weigh against the cold logic of modernisation.

As Hopkins mused of those who felled his Binsey poplars: “Oh if we but knew what we do/When we delve or hew/ Hack and rack the growing green... After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.”

There are local elections due in Plymouth six weeks from now. I would not rate the chances of re-election of any councillor who backed the felling of trees in Armada Way very highly at all.