There are two extremely handsome rowan trees at either end of a small block of Oxford City Council flats in South Street, Osney. They help to distract the eye from what is, in truth, a very ugly building. Guess what? The city council is going to chop them down in a week or two.

I know this because, in common with other Osney Island residents, I have had a letter co-signed by council leader Bob Price about it. He writes: “A recent survey of the trees showed that they are both diseased.”

In felling the trees, he adds, the council wants “to avoid repeating the experience of the East Street willows”. (This, you might remember, concerned the wholesale destruction, by the council, of a row of mature trees lining the west bank of the Thames, some of which, it was later shown, could have been saved.) “So we are letting you know in advance.”

Well, not very in advance, Bob. The trees are being felled in July, he says, so their death could come as soon as next Thursday.

But why all this hurry — especially when Bob admits that two years could elapse before the trees’ disease advances to the degree that they “need” felling?

Why not plant new trees on the site to grow alongside the others until it is time for them to come down? That way locals and passers-by would not be forced to endure the sight of the flats shorn of their protective cover. Humans could enjoy the appearance — many birds the taste — of the orange berries coming up later in the summer. The replacement willows in East Street, I note, are doing well — positively flourishing — three years on from their planting.

The answer would seem to lie in something else the council is planning to do with the flats — which is to place solar panels on their roofs. The height of the rowans suggests they would impair the efficiency of these.

This is not admitted in the letter from Bob and Barbara Hammond, chair of West Oxford Community Renewables, which is leading the drive for the solar panels. But that this has to be the case is clear from their phrasing: “We hope to install the panels in July and we want to let you know that the [trees] are being felled before the work starts.”

If the forthcoming felling of the trees has nothing to do with the installation of the panels, then why mention it at all?

In a different letter sent only to residents of South Street, Barbara and Bob state that any replacement trees “will need to be smaller species so they do not shade the panels”.

Bit of a clincher, eh?

As with other aspects of fashionable greenery — including most notoriously wind turbines — solar panels point up a disjunction between what is good (allegedly) for the planet and what is desirable on aesthetic grounds.

They present a significant problem in a place like Osney where, at the urging of the busybody residents’ association, the council has successfully introduced an Article 4 Direction. This is a tough planning tool, imposing strict controls over what owners can and can’t do with their houses.

Owing to a personal experience upon which I shall not, at present, dilate, I have long viewed as contemptible the planners’ ‘down’ — though with a number of notorious exceptions — on Velux windows in street-facing roofs in Osney.

In all the years the planners have been fitfully policing this rule, it was always clear to me that the day would come when the absurdity of the veto would be demonstrated in the enthusiasm that those same council controllers would show for equally disfiguring (or equally not, I would say) solar panels. Well, the day has come.

Bob and Barbara report in their letter that “we have established that planning permission for solar photovoltaic panels is no longer needed on the street-facing slopes or houses in Article 4 Direction areas”.

Does the same apply to Velux (and similar) windows? If not, then it ought to. If so, then all the residents’ ‘representatives’, all the planning officers and inspectors ought to own up over the balls they have been talking for years about the ‘integrity of the streetscape’, the ‘rhythm of the roofline’ and the like.