Really weedy excuses....

Now I'm no gardener or tree expert but I'd hazard a guess that a jungle of weeds growing around the roots of a young whip would not do much to enhance growth! The trees on the corner of Bank Street and the High Street are a disgrace. There can be no doubting that. They don't look nice, in fact they look terrible. Worse though is that they typify what's wrong with "the council." Tonbridge blog has highlighted this problem before and the main problem seems to be that there is no "the council." What we have is a clutch of departments, leisure, conservation area buildings, planning, engineering, safety etc etc. You would have thought that you'd be able to, with a few phone calls, identify which of these departments would be responsible for a couple of trees in hideous containers which were put there to replace two perfectly sound mature trees which were there before these pathetic specimens appeared. But oh no! because, apparently, trees on the pavement and especially if they are moveable pieces of "street furniture" fall into Highways Department's juristriction and guess what? That isn't even anything to do with good old Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council; that down to KCC. That is to say Kent County Council. Just like schools, libraries and roads, this is someone else's fault and definitely not TMBC's. Good so what happens now that we know who's fault they are? The trees at the corner of Bank Street, I'm convinced are really just the tip of a very large ice berg, the fact that they haven't been weeded for a year, when they badly need it, is for me a minor annoyance. The reasons behind why they haven't I find intensely irritating. If we want to be taken seriously as a tourist town, or town in which we're proud to live and work, we ought to be able to sort out a couple of trees without all these weedy excuses....