Head to Head does Plane Trees

This week’s topic: That the City should ban plane trees

Andrew Woodhouse
A tree is not a four-letter word. I’m no Druid tree-worshipper but I know London Plane trees support animal habitats, absorb car fumes and filter direct light in winter, providing warmth and UV rays to ward off osteoporosis. In summer they offer extra shade, saving energy to reduce strain on our unreliable electricity grid.

Their equipage and equipoise enhance neighbours’ privacy, moderate fierce winds with their foliage, and knowingly intercept water run-off for storage within their roots to reduce street floods.

These trees have more natural intelligence than all the City of Sydney Council.

Their beautiful branches arch to kiss, prayer-like, creating cathedrals of canopies.

They’ve seen changes in Bourke Street, Surry Hills, over 85 years, fending off recent attacks from bike paths. In Victoria Street, Potts Point, they stood witness on that cold winter’s day, 4th July 1975, as heritage campaigner Juanita Nielsen hurried to an appointment with death, never to be seen again. We’re deaf to their whispering secrets as they stand vigil over her home like silent sentinels. They’re living spirits and memorials to her passion.

They embrace our city like an emerald necklace.

Their only needs are water, pruning and empathy when they get pro-creative three weeks a year, spreading pollen. Irritatators claim these minor irritants threaten life on earth. Science doesn’t support this plane-trees-are-killers thesis. Now, their own family tree is threatened. ‘They’re not natives’, scream greenies, as though they’re illegitimate and must be charcoaled. Greenies prefer incompatible gum trees with their flailing bark, poor canopy, breaking branches and car duco-damaging, dripping gum. Since ‘natives’ are anything born here, such claims are asinine.

Perhaps a perfect urban street tree has no thirst, no roots and solar panel ‘leaves’, Obviously, white-coated geneticists must research this new gene-tree project urgently.

As you read this, autumnal leaves float to earth from whence they came, providing crunchy carpets of richly-textured matting, as heritage-listed golden groves of plane trees usher in the seasons, part of a heavenly time clock: a sustainable strategem well-worth saving.

Peter Whitehead
As a rule bans should be banned, but the City [presumably Clover and her obedient independents] does need to quit sticking plane trees everywhere. For her own good Lord Mayor Moore must break her bad habit and try other species, preferably Australian, to provide sustenance for indigenous birds in this increasingly alien city.

Surely Town Hall is not planting these Northern Hemisphere natives to create Sydney Central Casting’s generic Western city for the benefit of foreign film-makers too cheap to shoot in their own countries?

The Sycamore – as the plane tree is better known where it belongs – is a hardy plant likely to last centuries. Forget Sustainable Sydney 2030 – in the year 2330 these trees planted now will be bursting billions of tiny seeds from their spiky pods to lodge in the throats and eyes of hapless pedestrians. Asthma drugs may be better then….
Putting our hands on our heads, and doing what Clover says, seems harmless until you consider the consequences.

The King Street cycleway is the latest example of what goes wrong when the Moore grand vision is set in stone. 200 metres of lamentable inadequacy at what cost?
Work begins in June to jam a cycle way into Bourke Street. Activist residents are being vilified for defending their neighbourhood. What would they know? They only live there.

Parking spaces will be lost and trees removed to squeeze a narrow two-way bicycle path up the western side between parked cars and the footpath. Apparently this was the cycleway the Roads and Traffic Authority did not say no to. If Council cannot overcome the RTA’s ham-fisted hold on our roads it were better to desist from busybody plans.

The RTA may not be legally liable for injuries from accidents waiting to happen on this booby trap. City of Sydney is.

The City should stop imposing a questionable notion of style upon us all.
Sycamore trees! Sick of more of the same. Sick of more community so-called consultations where overpaid flunkies feed us sandwiches, cakes and Furphies and force through expensive fixes for things that ain’t broke.