Sir – I felt I had to stop the tree-cutters at Cripley Island, as after numerous efforts to speak to any official who could take responsibility and hold up the work for a few hours while the issue could be debated — and despite many phone calls — nobody at the council would respond. So direct action was the last resort. You only get one chance to save a tree!

I support the use of allotments, but, people who pay just a few pounds a year for them (subsidised by all of us) should not be destroying adjoining wilderness areas; and men with machinery usually tend to take matters a little further than anticipated.

The perpetrators repeat this mantra of “willows must be pollarded” as if the trees are evil or something. This is foolish, trees have done OK for a few million years without human intervention; and these are young healthy trees, which they’ve emasculated into stunted lollipop shapes.

All those who helped in this travesty seem to know nothing about nature.

A wildlife expert might have saved a few more trees for the tree-creeper that visited while I was still up the tree. They would have perhaps suggested saving the woodpecker’s nest — now lying chopped-up on the ground. Would have talked about the fungus and the hibernating insects and the interdependence of it all.

Conflicts over tree “management” keeps happening in Oxford.

We need a serious debate on whether we tidy and control for peoples recreation, or we let-it-be for the ever more threatened wildlife. If we don’t get a grip here, ‘pocket parks’ will be all that’s left.

Mike Hamblett, Oxford