Sir – If, as an ordinary person, I live in a conservation area and have a 100-year-old Wellingtonia, a cedar and a couple of yew trees growing in my garden, I expect to be prosecuted if I damage them.

Curiously, if I am an Oxford college with architectural ambitions, I not only expect but get an official blessing for wrecking them, in the form of planning permission. This seems to have happened at The Centre for Middle East Studies in Woodstock Road.

The trees were probably planted after the house was built (around 1866), so they adapted, in youth, to those particular ground conditions.

Building so close to an older tree intrudes on the roots, which can extend far beyond the height of the tree, and it will have a detrimental effect on the trees’ ability to draw up moisture. The tree will then ail and be culled as a ‘hazard’.

The impressions of how the new building will look with the Wellingtonia in front are unrealistic and highlight the fact that, to ambitious patrons and their servants, trees are just accessories or props rather than living, breathing elders bestowing a sense of majestic continuity on a distinctive neighbourhood.

Susan Heeks, Oxford