Green brigade strives to save avenue trees from ‘capital’ punishment

Nature enthusiasts remove nails hammered in trees on Sasthamangalam-Vellayambalam stretch.
Volunteers cleaning the pots littered with waste.
Volunteers cleaning the pots littered with waste.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The avenue trees lining the busy Sasthamangalam-Vellayambalam thoroughfare are getting a new lease of life. Years of human interference of hammering nails and tying up trees with cords for advertising are eventually getting taken care of. In an initiative, which got underway on World Environmental Day, a group of nature enthusiasts started removing the nails hammered into tree trunks and waste littered in the plant pots thereby giving them a breather. More than 30 trees have been covered, and the group has documented around 80 per cent of the stretch.

An initiative of the Vattiyoorkavu Youth brigade (Vybe), an initiative led by MLA V K Prasanth, and Green Army International, the project involves organisations like Tree Walk, Indus Cycling Embassy, Conserve Backwaters etc.“The stretch is regarded as a model stretch. However, the trees are in a neglected state. The health of the trees has been affected with most of them struck with nails and many outgrowing the pots. So, the project was initiated to document the trees and their health and draw up a plan to take care of them,” said an official of MLA’s office.

“The trees were planted years ago as part of beautification, but there was hardly any follow-up action. It was executed without a plan since they planted trees in pots. The trees have outgrown the pots and in most places, the pots have cracked. Advertisers have struck nails and billboards on the trees. They are also getting tangled up in electric lines. All these are being addressed. Since the trees were not planted by us, we cannot get directly involved . We intend to prepare a report after the documentation and analysis and can give suggestions and will seek the response from the authorities concerned,” says K K Krishna Kumar, mentor at Green Army International. The group is also campaigning in the locality to help address the issue. “The tree is also a living organism and such human interventions affect its health,” he added.

Ajay Sreedhar S V, another mentor at Green Army International, said that the group could not find a single tree that was healthy and almost all of them were affected by some sort of human activity.“In most cases, the trees are confined in such a manner that they cannot even grow properly while some have electric lines caught inside them. We have also noticed that proper pruning is not being carried out and the lights put up on the trees for illumination seldom get removed and the tree has to grow with these interventions, which eventually end up creating wounds on the trees,” he said. The Sasthamangalam-Vellayamabalam stretch has been taken up as a pilot step and the group intends to replicate this elsewhere in the city. A minor beautification of the stretch is also part of the plan, said group members.

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