Gerry Daly voices doubts about those new city trees

One of Ireland's most respected gardening experts has expressed doubts about the types of tree planned for O'Connell Street in Dublin once the current London planes have been felled.

Mr Gerry Daly, host of RTÉ Radio's Ask About Gardening, said he would have doubts about the suitability of rowans and flowering crab apples in a formal urban setting.

Dublin City Council has been defending its plans to fell the mature London plane trees in the centre of the street. Twenty-one of the 57 have already been felled as part of the council's four-year plan to rejuvenate the capital's main street.

The 1998 O'Connell Street Integrated Area Plan said that due to "the height and extensive foliage of [the London plane] trees the street facades are hidden from view, creating two spatial corridors in the street."

It plans to remove these so that each side of the street can be seen from the other, replacing them with up to 200 smaller trees "in key locations". These will be a variety of species - lime, planes, rowans and flowering crab apple. .

According to Mr Daly the rowan are a natural, wild species.

"I don't know if they would suit the large, formal setting of a major urban thoroughfare," he said.

"The flowering crab apple is a very good garden tree, but I wonder if it would suit the scale and architecture of O'Connell Street."

While stressing that he could not pass judgment on the entirety of the plan because he had not seen the details he also raised doubts about the reasoning behind plans to have large columns of trees on each side of the street, rather than down the middle as at present.

"On the Continent trees would be planted along the sides of the street to create shade. But that's not necessarily something that's high on the list of priorities for most people in Ireland," he said.

He said the London planes themselves were very valuable, given their age, history and amenity value. They could, he said, be removed without being felled.