Tree guards are pointless and should be banned for sake of the environment

YOUR correspondent Paul Morley (The Yorkshire Post, March 5) is quite correct in pointing out that trees have been growing happily and healthily here in the UK for hundreds of years without tree guards. Tree guards were not invented until 1973 and were intended to encourage slow growing plants to grow more quickly. They have now become universal, mainly because contracts for grant-aided planting require tree guards to be used.

It is a total nonsense to plant a small sapling to help the environment and cut carbon and then wrap it in a petro chemical plastic tree guard typically three feet long and three inches in diameter, which does not biodegrade, costs twice the price of the sapling it is designed to protect and will still be littering the countryside, long after the young sapling requires it.

As your correspondent points out, it is not necessary. It is not only poisonous and harmful to wildlife, but it also encourages the tree to be weak and unhealthy as the effect of the tube is similar to ‘forcing’ rhubarb, by not allowing wind and weather to ‘harden’ the young trunk. The sooner they are banned the better. We managed to ban plastic drinking straws, surely we can manage to ban these useless horrors?