Save us from the plague of plastic tree protectors

Can nothing protect us from a plague of plastic tree protectors? They’ve descended on us like locusts, covering our hills, dales and roadsides with a nasty green and black petrochemical swarm. They are not for the most part biodegradable, and those that claim to be will still disintegrate into microplastic debris lodged into our soil.

I should know. Five years ago I planted 3,000 tree saplings on the fields below our house; and there to this day the pale green square or tubular guards remain, the young trees having outgrown any need for protection and the guards, or remnants of guards, littering the grassy slope. I know we’ll have to remove and collect them. I know it will be a bugger of a job because they get snagged with grass, nettles and brambles, and the plastic will have become brittle and liable to shatter. I know that cutting the polypropylene tubes or unwinding the PVC wrap-around spirals renders most of them unusable for second plantings. And I know most landowners and highways agencies never bother.

We’ll do it, nevertheless; but we’re now resolved that new plantings will either be without protectors (meaning that around a half instead of the usual three-quarters are likely to survive) or else with one of the new, environmentally friendly types – of which more in a moment. But I despair of seeing any major move by Britain’s big tree–planters to change their ways. The Woodland Trust pledged three years ago to stop using these plastic nuisances, but – online – still appear to be selling them, presumably because demand is strong. Whatever happened to the good old Darwinian sink-or-swim principle? Our era’s soft-headed approach to social policy appears to extend now even to trees.