It's a saw point: why Hong Kong's urban trees need managing better

Don Picker still finds it upsetting to visit the Bonham Road area in Mid-Levels. It's hard for the veteran arborist to see stumps where once there were four magnificent Chinese banyans growing out of the stone embankment on St Stephen's Lane - the result, as he sees it, of needless tree-felling.

The Highways Department action was prompted by the earlier collapse of another tree in the area during a severe storm, injuring two people. Consultants found a second tree in the vicinity to be in poor condition and it was duly removed. But two weeks later, on the evening of August 7, Highways officials decided to cut down the remaining banyans, saying that new cracks discovered in the stone wall made the trees unstable and prone to collapse.

Workers moved in quickly, and by the next morning the quartet of century-old banyans had been removed.

Picker, managing director of the Asia Tree Preservation company, says he had looked at the trees earlier and noticed that they had already been trimmed to reduce the weight of the crowns. He laments the felling, saying that the ancient banyans could have been saved with some structural reinforcement.

Hong Kong is one of the few cities in the world with a large number of so-called stone-wall trees. These are ficus microcarpa - known variously as Chinese banyan, Indian laurel and curtain fig - a hardy species that can thrive on walls and other concrete structures as their roots burrow through cracks.

Singapore had a few but most were removed. In contrast, Hong Kong Island has a proliferation of trees that sprang up on walls and slopes over the past century, and residents increasingly value the softening effect of the greenery amid the city's sprawl of high-rises.