And where is Pamela who roared so much about the removal of trees in front of Auberge de Castille .

Who’s interested in Kennedy Grove? It was a Nationalist government project under the Borg Olivier administration. Similarly, the Marsaskala Family Park opened 2 years ago. And the same attitude by a Lejber government has been shown towards the rehabilitation of the Maghtab landfill which the Mintoff government created and ‘developed’.

May I gently point out that the word you probably meant to use is “invasive”. Unless the trees you speak of grew legs to get out of the way of the bulldozers, “evasive” doesn’t really make any sense in the context.

Ah! Six, a thousand trees were uprooted because they were classified as evasive and are going to be replaced by indigenous trees instead.

Some four years ago, several schoolchildren (one of mine included) planted trees – a thousand or so, I believe – in a site next to Kennedy Grove, in a project spearheaded by George Pullicino. (My daughter still considers it “her” tree, and enjoys seeing how it’s grown over the years the few times we drive by.)

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20101121/local/1-000-trees-planted-at-salina-this-weekend.337111

That site is now also the subject of a controversy – Evarist Bartolo is planning to uproot the trees to make way for a new school. What greater education for children than to make them aware of the environment, rather than destroy part of the environment to which they feel they have contributed?

Lets get things straight. One, this is an EU project that was planned and applied for under the previous administration. If this administration stopped or tweaked the project beyond its original scope, Malta would have lost 50 million euros. Indeed the project is mostly being implemented as originally planned. PN? PL? Doesn’t make a difference.TM steamed ahead. The EU is its paymaster not the national government.
Two, the scope of the project is not primarily to divert or ease traffic but to almost exclusively improve the safety of the road. Till now not a year passed by without the Coast Road claiming lives.
Three, Newsbook indeed got wrong. The 2000 trees were located along the whole stretch of the Coast Road, not just within Kennedy Grove. But yes a few tens were located within.
Four, just because you never noticed the trees along the Coast Road, it doesn’t mean they weren’t there. Indeed there were hundreds, many of them not bigger then a mid-sized bush. I will explicitly point to the Tamarix tree, of which there were hundreds. This tree doesn’t grow very much and many times takes the shape of a mid-sized bush. It blends easily with the Maltese landscape and people hardly ever give it any notice. But it is highly protected and indeed down to the tiniest sampling of this species was classified as a ‘tree’ and transplanted accordingly

In an arid land in need of shade from the punishing sun one would think that trees are a blessing.

They say trees bring vermin.

Vermin are not caused by trees.

The Black Forest and the mighty forests of British Colombia and Washington state should be crawling with vermin, but they are not.

Vermin are caused by over-population in a crowded small area and plenty of good eats for them because of filth and garbage strewn about in a year round warm climate and unhygienic practices like Maltese burial practices in cemeteries and shallow sanitary sewers with poor upkeep.

I don’t get it; maybe I have lived in North America for too long to figure out their mentality.