Trees in Valletta

Alfredo Camilleri (The Sunday Times, September 23) responded to my previous letter about the upgrading project of Great Siege Square, Valletta, in which I outlined the process that led to the decisions taken in that project. Secondly, I have never been chairman of the Valletta Rehabilitation Committee.

For 20 years, after disagreement with the way things were being handled in the past months led to my resignation last month, I was the executive co-ordinator of the Valletta Rehabilitation Project, that is the executive arm of the committee.

My personal opinion on trees in Valletta is well known and I have always spoken publicly on this. I have always stated that if the trees in Great Siege Square and St John Square damage the cathedral then they should be removed immediately. We have no proof of this so the trees should not be removed. Even in the discussion of some weeks ago about the removal of trees in St John Square and in Market Square (which were removed) I spoke against this.

On the contrary, in 20 years I have always been in favour of introducing more trees. I was responsible for the upgrading of the three main gardens, that is the Lower and Upper Barracca Gardens and Hastings Garden.

In all three, we added a substantial amount of trees, though in the last project, in which VRP in the end had only partial responsibility, the amount of trees planned were not all added. Furthermore we had started a campaign to remove unsightly trees and plant olive trees along the bastions, another project never completed.

All over the world there is an increased effort to plant more trees in cities except in Malta where the trend is to create 'gardens' that resemble only large paving areas and to remove a lot of the urban trees which have been with us for over a hundred years.