Part of the deal

I imagine that part of the deal when the development of Epsom Station got the go ahead was the planting of a suitable number of trees and shrubs to green the thing up a bit. This has now been duly done and large number of small box bushes and a smaller number of much larger trees have been planted, this in the late spring, rather late in the season for planting such things, at least by the standards of domestic, rather than public, gardening.

The ground around the box bushes looks very dry although the bushes remain green, at least for the moment.

The ground around the trees looks very dry too, although in this case there appear to be plastic pipes sticking out into which water might be introduced, if anyone could be bothered. Most of the trees have now come into leaf although there is, even if things now go well, going to be a certain amount of die back. But this one, the one illustrated that is, has not and something has happened to the ground around it. Not clear if the subsidence is the result of rain or of spade, but either way there look to be plenty of voids around the root ball which came with the tree. This, I would think is a bad thing, the result of sloppy and/or hurried planting.

I am reminded of a general irritation with municipal tree planting, the way that lots of money gets spent on planting trees but there is no money available for the occasional watering while they get established. I can see that councils do not want to be planting trees that need to be watered every week, but a bit of a helping hand at the outset would not go amiss. The planting of some even larger trees, some years ago, on the Albert Embankment between Vauxhall and Lambeth bridges was a case in point.

There maybe a handover problem: the developer has been paid to plant the plants but their contract says nothing about watering. That is down to the maintenance contractor who has not yet come on stream.

And then there is the general irritation with householders who won't or at least don't water the rather smaller trees that get planted in the verges outside their houses. Either they are lazy or they refuse on principle to water council trees on the grounds that that is down to the council. I pay taxes to get that sort of thing done for me. Are they the sort of people who read the 'Daily Mail'? Probably not the 'Sun' as the sort of people who admit to reading this newspaper do not generally live in roads which have grass verges in which to plant trees and I would hope that readers of the 'Guardian' did the decent thing and got their watering can out when they got back from work, despite their panting for their pre-prandial cocktail after an hour on a  crowded & smelly train.

PS: I assume that cast iron grids (or their modern, plastic equivalent) to place in the neat square holes left in the brick paving are in the post. Minor failing in project management.