I have just read a news item about tree-planting projects at Ta' Qali and some other areas. This is very commendable but I hope that the right kind of trees will be planted. We need trees to break the monotony and starkness of our environment. We need big thick trees for the blessed shade they provide, especially now that we are all aware of the danger of exposure to the sun.

We need big trees for visual relief from the all-pervading white glare, especially in summer. We need trees to screen some very ugly architecture and some downright decrepitude. We need trees to take our eyes away from the dusty clutter of much of our surroundings. We need trees to remind us that there is such a thing as nature, surviving bravely and sturdily in the midst of all our pollution. We need trees, we need them as much as the air we breathe, indeed we need them for the sake of the air we breathe. Why, they could even provide some shady parking.

So, we need big trees - big broad spreading trees, evergreens, thick-foliaged, dark-foliaged.

Instead trees are being needlessly felled. Stumps of felled trees abound on big roundabouts such as the one at Kordin, and in other places such as the very wide traffic island on the Zabbar side of Cottoner Gate. You can see several stumps on the edge of the Marsa Sports Club bordering the road. They were certainly not causing any damage or trouble to anyone there.

I say this because I have heard many horror tales of trees, such as litter, bird droppings, damage to buildings etc. I wonder how they cope in other countries. As to litter, it is we who pollute and degrade the environment, not the trees!

Again, if we do not intend to exterminate sparrows, we must accept also their inconvenience. I wonder what they do about droppings abroad. Very often, while abroad, even in big cities, you can find some quiet square where you can sit on a bench and rest in the shade of a beautiful tree. Don't birds drop droppings there?

Someone even complained to me that insects breed in trees! If we go on this way we shall soon destroy every living thing that does not actually feed or clothe us!

The main crime of trees, according to many, is that their roots damage buildings. What do they do about this in other countries? But anyway, surely there are many isolated spots where big trees can be planted without damaging buildings. The area I mentioned before, on the Zabbar side of Cottoner Gate, and some spaces by the side are ideal.

In some places, other trees have been planted, but they are usually small and flimsy, of a pale grey-green colour and provide very little shade. In other places no trees at all were planted, such places as Zabbar Road in Fgura, which has now become a dreary, dusty thoroughfare, and in Misrah is-Sliem in Zabbar, where old trees have been removed and replaced by black lamp posts and a plethora of litter bins.

Sometimes trees are chopped down in the name of embellishment. Some embellishment! "Embellishment" and "upgrading" have become fearful words for me because very often they mean that some grand old trees are doomed.

Rather than felling trees, we should be planting more and bigger trees.

And not palms, please! I cannot understand the current craze for palms. They provide little or no shade, their fronds are usually very high up, so all you can see at eye level is their long thin trunk. They are not native to Malta, and I don't see why we should change the look of our landscape to resemble somebody else's.

Why should we replace beautiful trees with palms? I am thinking of the awful sight on the Kappara roundabout, looking for all the world like a cluster of gibbets. Why were not other trees planted there? There is enough space in the centre of such a big roundabout for a couple of big leafy trees, without obstructing traffic.

Nobody would miss the fountain there. At that point every eye is on the traffic lights, but big trees can be seen from far away. There are palms on the roundabout at Burmarrad, another big area where other trees could have been planted without any bother to anyone. Palms on the roundabout on entering Mellieha, palms on the roundabout further on the bypass to Ghadira, and doubtless on numerous other roundabouts. Palms at the upper end of Paola Square, Paola.

Palms have even been planted in some odd corners on the road from Marsaxlokk to Marsascala, a very quiet road in a rural area, a road which cries out for some big trees to break the monotony of the dusty, colourless landscape. Marsascala itself is full of palms. There are even palms in the empty spaces around the car park at Zonqor Point. What a wonderful sight it would be to see some magnificent big trees there, with the open sea as background. One can compare the opposite ends of the area just beyond the Blata l-Bajda flyover. At one end we have palms, at the other thick leafy trees, and it is obvious which is the lovelier end.

We are also seeing many instances of heavy, almost brutal, pruning of trees. After such pruning, the trees look like a child's drawing of a tree - just a trunk with a small blob of green on top. Does pruning have to be so drastic? Big branches are usually lobbed off, the result being a lop-sided and denuded tree. Again I mention the edge of the Marsa sports ground where it seems big branches were lobbed off unnecessarily. They were not in anybody's way. One fine day you go for your usual stroll in the shade, and all you find are bare trunks and a few lofty branches.

The trees on the stretch of road from Hompesch Gate to Zabbar were planted about 50 years ago. I was then a pupil at Zabbar Primary School and we were taken to watch the ceremony. Agatha Barbara, who was then Minister of Education, planted them. My impression is that the occasion was called Arbor Day and such Arbor Days were held in various towns as part of the government's campaign to plant more trees in public areas and to instil a love of trees, especially in children.

It is a great pity that we have lost quite a number of these trees, what with traffic lights, extra-spacious bus-stops, non-replacement of dead trees etc. I hope we shall preserve the rest. However, I feel that the pruning here is again too much. The trees have now become just high trunks with some branches and leaves about 30 feet up.

Why is it that the sight of a magnificent tree seems to trigger an instinct to reduce it to something resembling a pom-pom on a poodle's tail or destroy it altogether? Sometimes I suspect that we are so shackled and tangled up in this overcrowded island that we cannot stand the sight of the grandeur and freedom of nature. We feel this need to reduce everything to our limited mentality.

I love trees. I am certainly no expert, but the sight of a beautiful tree gives me great pleasure. I would like to mention some of my favourite spots as regards trees, but I won't in case someone gets an inclination to take a chainsaw to them. Beautiful spots notwithstanding, I am still so distressed whenever I see a noble tree, especially one that has long graced our environment, murdered or mutilated.