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Vasagatan trees for the chop

Vasagatan och cyklister by Elmar Eye
Vasagatan och cyklister, a photo by Elmar Eye on Flickr.
The lime trees in Vasagatan are being removed because some of them are in poor condition. They will be replaced by a named variety of ornamental maple whose leaves turn red in the autumn. Some of the new chosen type were planted a few years ago and can be seen in the background on the right.

Unfortunately it is going to be at least ten years before they get to a significant size. I would also question the wisdom of planting an entire avenue with a single variety of tree, or even a single species. The English landscape was once famous for its elms, Ulmus procera. Within a decade they had vanished, victims of Dutch elm disease. The trees were in fact a clone, and as soon as some disease came along,  they were all equally vulnerable and they all succumbed. Itr was only a matter of time.

Formal avenues always present a problem from this point of view because the sense of formality is lost if the trees are not all the same. But if the trees were at least grown from seed, there would be the genetic diversity to reduce the chance of losing them all at one go in the future.

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