Is there a conspiracy of silence about the current unsightly plight of our horse chestnut trees? Responding to a telephone enquiry, a South Bucks District Council spokesman said he knew nothing about it but after consulting a colleague he returned to say there was no need for concern since the trees would undoubtedly recover.
It appears that the grub of the horse chestnut leaf miner – a tiny thing – is one of the culprits and entered the country as an unwelcome immigrant some six years ago. The horse chestnuts are also being attacked by another assailant in the form of a disease called bleeding canker, which appears on the trunk. This is caused by a bacterium that flourishes due to the recent spate of mild winters and wet springs.
The Forestry Commission say that the disease is currently affecting some 75% of all horse chestnuts in the South East and the result may be the death of the trees. Those infected by leaf miner alone are at serious risk because the whole tree is severely weakened when the leaf-fall is accelerated as if it were an early autumn. So why is there a total lack of media interest when Dutch Elm disease was major headline news? There has been virtually no newspaper comment about this current blight other than a trivial piece in the
Telegraph, lamenting the dismal future for ‘conkering’ children.
Taplow and Hitcham have many major horse-chestnut trees which are now suffering severely and looking extremely sorry for themselves. Many are in areas where the developers who own the land would welcome an excuse to remove them.
Perhaps the South East of today, with its vast urbanisation programme, has replaced tree huggers with tree shruggers; who cares about messy, inconvenient, leaf- and branch-dropping, soil-sapping, shade-creating old trees anyway?
I do, for one!
Fred Russell
