Was this the right space to plant trees?

On Anna Salai, outside the premises of the Government Estate Metro Station, plants best described as “tweens” if viewed from a human perspective, are already exposed to the vagaries of indifferent civic planning. The idea that they are an afterthought had been telegraphed to them right from their cradle.

Too old to be doted upon as saplings and too young to be dubbed trees and allowed to fend for themselves, each of them was gasping for air, the road pressing on every lobe in its “lungs”. The road having closed in on them, there was no way their roots would receive any extraneous gift of water. They had to sniff their way to any moisture under the hard slab of bitumen slammed down on them.

Smothered by bitumen, these plants were on a trajectory likely to end in root asphyxiation.

Their growth could be stunted at best. In the worse of cases, after a tree had grown robust, it could have had a fall (a literal one) on account of its Achilles’ feet. The restrictive pressure on its roots weakening it, it could become easy picking for some cyclone sometime.

The fledgling trees on the section of Anna Salai jogging alongside the Government Estate Metro station had no breathing space, the road pressing on each of the lobes of its “lungs”.
| Photo Credit:
PRINCE FREDERICK

Around two weeks ago, an exercise was initiated to give these trees something they should have been given at the very start of their life journeys: tree pit pavers.

Tree pit pavers have been retrofitted. That would be just a mild amelioration of a rather unhealthy environment these green beings find themselves in. They are still provided with only a narrow strip of earth untouched by civic infrastructure. And if one took a closer look, even this patch is not as pristine as it would seem when viewed with a superficial eye. From an image or two of the work before the tree pit pavers were slipped in show a cable running alongside a tree. Besides, silt catch pits are located close to some of them.

That raises the question: was this patch the right space to grow trees? Given the general tenor of civic planning, the duple meter of rethinking and rejigging and some more rethinking and rejigging, this patch could be dug up, further unsettling the trees (that is once they have become trees). If the trees on TTK Road (particularly the rain trees, planted at a time when awareness about the necessity of promoting native species had not even put out shoots) have huge girths, they arrived before the pavements did. Urban greening now gets the species right (the ones on this section of Anna Salai are all native species) but the spaces consistently wrong. The question worth mulling over: should tree planting be allowed on sections where trees cannot be offered enough earth that is free of “development-based encumbarances”.

Returning to Anna Salai, the plants might have been gifted a piece of loose soil on which pavers have been placed, but they are still pressing against the pavement. There is still suffocation, restriction of movement and lack of freedom. Managers of urban roads (in the case of Anna Salai, it would be the state highways) should pause and ponder deeply before allowing or initiating any tree planting exercise on these roads, making sure it would do justice to the trees as they grow up.