This post doesn't have a photo. At our local Westhill shopping centre the developers are in and the mature trees surrounding the shopping centre have been cut down, reduced to wood chip and the roots pulled out. For good measure the huge rocks that were part of the landscape have been hauled aside, so hundreds of square metres of woodcover and landscape garden are now a heap of roots, woodchip, piles of stripped soil. This eyesore will be replaced by some extra shops,and a slip road into the enlarged car park.
That's progress and in a growing town makes sense – but only a certain kind of sense. This is a community built around green areas, with generous provision of tree and shrub cover, and therefore a rich and diverse wildlife and flora. My inner feeling looking at this scarring of landscape reminded me of Hopkins' poem in response to the hacking down of a stand of poplars he thought of as creature companions. I guess I know a wee bit how he felt.
Yes I'll use the shopping centre. I may even come to appreciate the new shops. But at the moment mature sycamores felled in their autumn colours, some mountain ash with their rowan berries and a number of scotch pines all planted in the 19 60's seem like a heavy proce to pay – again. Becasuse this isn;t the only place such developments happen. I resent the word development being used for a policy that seems at least as retrogressive as progressive, and which undervalues the loss to a community of so much natural life sustaining landscape.
Binsey Poplars, Gerard Manley Hopkins
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering
weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew-
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will made no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.
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