Country Life A TREELESS LANDSCAPE.
The following letter reaches me from a resident on the edge of Stratford-on-Avon :-
" Yesterday the crime was perpetrated which you foreshadowed in a recent contribution to the Spectator. There was a big sale of timber at Leamington, at which were sold all the trees which had any timber value along the ridge from the War Memorial eastward. There were also sold all the elms which had made the lane to the Warwick road a fine avenue. The farmer on the other side of the road had already felled his trees. The road will run in future over bare open fields. Several other local farmers joined in the sale, and the destruction will be widespread. I have it on the authority of an experienced timber merchant that a very large proportion of the trees are scarcely worth cutting for their timber value, while for their effect in the landscape their loss is deplorable. No tract of English country will suffer more from this wholesale slaughter than the Midlands. We have no 'natural features,' our sky-lines and our vistas owe nothing to the lie of the land. Stripped to the surface, Shakespeare's England is a featureless land of muddy undulations. But it has a faculty of taking light and shade, and as the modistes say, it ' pays for dressing.' The colour and the outline, the light and shade, are all the gift of the great trees and hedgerows. The farmer owner is felling the one and allowing the other to fall into a ruin of dead sticks. Incongruous houses in an old town, petrol pumps, and ribbon development of bungalows are all bad enough. But this wholesale destruction of trees goes far beyond them in its universality and its effect. It will change, the face of England unless a remedy can be found. We want something like the Wild Bird Protection Acts."
It will be remembered that when the Trevelyan estate on the edges of Stratford-on-Avon was sold to a group of land " developers "—with apolgies for the word—the value of the timber was especially emphasized in the sequent sale. The part of the property next to Stratford was saved by the energy and generosity of Mr. Flower, after the first sale. What has happened to the rest the above letter will make clear. The pity is that all could have been saved by the aid of a better public spirit in the first instance. * * * *
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