Removal of branches from Balzan trees

Unfortunately the correspondent who wrote the letter Tree Murder in Balzan (February 1) tries to give the false impression that the ELC employees who recently conducted the intervention on some trees at Balzan Valley, Balzan, capriciously exceeded their brief. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our experienced workers have always acted professionally, never work in a "frenzy" and always direct their "fervour" towards doing a good job.

We would like to place on record that following a very urgent request by the Balzan local council we inspected the state of the trees at Balzan Valley. This request was made following an incident that same morning when a limb from a tree fell on an oncoming car. While the car suffered considerable damage, its occupant was lucky enough to come out unscathed from this grave occurrence, which even required the intervention of the Civil Protection Department, the police and Enemalta. Apparently this was the third serious incident in two years.

Our qualified arborist, Larry Shoemake, and Peter Calleja from Malta Embellishment Landscaping Project, the government-appointed monitoring board, inspected the trees in question and both agreed on the need to immediately take the action required.

I quote hereunder from Mr Shoemake's report to the undersigned which speaks for itself on this particular intervention and on the general state of Malta's urban-planted trees, which should make interesting reading:

"The pruning of trees in Balzan Valley road was certainly not undertaken in a thoughtless way. Emergency pruning was implemented considering the overriding concern for immediate alleviation of public danger demonstrated in the same area when two large limbs failed on two different large Ficus trees within only a few months of each other.

"The simple fact is that the health and proper pruning of these trees in Balzan Valley Road was forfeit the day they were planted, given Malta's urban landscape of limited space for the growth of their canopy, trunk and root growth. In fact in most urban sites where such trees are found, the overriding factor governing maintenance of all trees is the limited space allotted to them and that reserved for humans and our accoutrements. So yet again 'best practices' are being subjugated for the time being in deference to public safety concerns brought about through the very urban environment in which these trees exist. It is mainly this factor which has led to these and many other trees being too tall and 'stretched'. This, together with frequent wounding from branch removal for immediate human interest, has brought about the current situation. One can notice in Balzan Valley Road that all these trees have grown at an angle away from the buildings. Moreover they have apparently been guided even further off balance in order to keep branches from interfering with habitations.

"In essence while gradual reduction in canopy size would have been ideal, the urgent situation mentioned above mandated the removal of the uppermost foliage and small branches which increase susceptibility to 'wind throw'. As much of the needed upper section branches were retained, since this is where trees allocate the largest portion of their 'energy storage' for new growth in the form of soluble sugars and starches. Unfortunately, as long as people are more interested in the view from their windows rather than the health of their environment, there will always be this recurring theme among what is now thankfully becoming a minority of residents in Malta's stone forests."

Readers would also be interested to note that two trees in the area are diseased and in a potentially dangerous state and that for this reason permission for their uprooting is being sought from the appropriate authorities.