Losing a peach of a beech

A FRIEND and neighbour of mine owns a farm on which there are several hundred beautiful mature trees. He loves them but recently they have cost him rather a lot of money.

The farm has quite a long road frontage and, unfortunately, when he employed a tree surgeon to survey the trees, he discovered that some of them were over-mature and in danger of falling on to passing traffic.

If such a thing does happen the landowner is legally liable. His insurance company became quite agitated. So, being a person who does things by the book, he embarked on the process of applying for a licence to fell them. This turned out to be an incredibly cumbersome and long-drawn out process involving several official bodies and government departments, each of which seemed very anxious to pass the file on to another one. But eventually, many months later, he was in a position to get back to the tree surgeons and ask them to remove the suspect trees.