Tree Issues

There are odd things which happen on occasion in Wiesbaden, which makes an American just stand there and shake his head.

If you ever walk around the entire city....you tend to notice two standards of landscaping.  One is the intense and organized style, where shrubs are trimmed yearly, trees get cleaned up or cleared when dead branches are noticed, and grass is cut.

The other style of landscaping is where an area is beyond normal view, and the city or village just lets thing go unchecked.  At some point, years later....folks notice the problem and get hyper.  So your city landscapers look at the problem and make a decision to really clean it up, or to just cut everything down and start over.

This week, around 05:30 AM on Tuesday.....some worker arrived at a site near the Main River...on the far southwest side of Wiesbaden.  Naturally, you'd note that it was before daylight, and odd that cops are also with the crew.  Then one resident calls another.  Near 06:15 AM, protesters had begun to arrive.  They were greeted by around ten to twenty cops....letting them protest but keeping them from the landscaping crew.

The actions underway?  There were roughly a hundred chestnut trees along the riverbank in this area, where things had not really managed or landscaped in a long time.  You notice a fair amount of these problems along the river as you travel via the bike paths near that area.....on both sides.

There's some legal action underway by the locals....disturbed that the trees were cut without their consent.  Naturally, the trees are on public property....maintained by the city, but rarely landscaped as years go by.

The local press would only say that somewhere between twenty-five and fifty folks continually protested, but things progressed on.

The issue with older trees.....as few people tend to grasp, is that they reach a point where stability and safety (branches) isn't reliable.  Last year, we had a person in Wiesbaden who walked under a tree, and a branch fell off on them.....killing them.  So it's a necessity, in some ways, to cut them back, and replant.

I can walk around the city and point out forty trees which are seriously leaning and ought to be cut. The odds that a crew could do it without protesters?  That's the question.