Horse Chestnuts for the Chop

By Kit Villiers, OISE Oxford tutor and Chairman of the Friends of Cutteslowe and Sunnymead Park.

Another of England's classic trees is under threat. The horse chestnut, better known to hordes of English schoolboys down the ages as the conker tree, has developed a deadly disease. Will it go the same way as the elm, which has virtually disappeared from our countryside?

Cutteslowe Park, Oxford's largest public park, has over 100 of these beautiful trees, many of them in three large avenues. Some trees are more badly infected than others, so one possibility that has been put forward is to remove the worst ones and replace them. However, at a well attended AGM recently, the Friends of Cutteslowe and Sunnymead Park were told that the problem with that solution is that new trees find it hard to get established against existing ones. The Council's tree officers therefore would prefer to fell a whole avenue at a time, and replace the chestnuts with something else. The denuding effect of this suggestion appalled some worthy locals in the audience, who in a questionnaire generally inclined to the view that if filling the gaps was not acceptable, at least we should spread out the felling as long as possible, perhaps over nine years. It was also suggested that after the first avenue has gone, we should take stock of the situation before demolishing any more. Unfortunately it would appear that all the chestnuts will go in time. The Council can't take the risk of a diseased limb falling and injuring someone - a distinct possibility in this very popular park - so they are not keen on delaying the felling and replacement process too long.

Luckily the news isn't all bad. There are 119 chestnuts altogether, 69 of which are in the three avenues, but this is out of a total of 1,711 trees in the Park as a whole. Also we can be quite imaginative in what replaces them. Here we have some choices, and nothing has been definitely decided. Should we retain the avenues with one species? Or perhaps a different type for each avenue, or even alternating types within the avenues? One possible replacement which has been suggested is liquid ambers. We've got one at home, and it looks lovely in the autumn, so I'll be supporting that as at least one replacement possibility. Let either Oxford City Council or the Friends of Cutteslowe and sunnymead Park know if you've got other ideas.

The other mitigating factor is that replacement saplings are likely to be be at least two metres tall even when first planted, so hopefully the Park won't look totally bare even if a whole avenue is taken out at a time.

What I want to know is what will schoolchildren do for conkers when all the conker trees disappear?