As crime scenes go, Whitecliff Harbourside Park in Poole must be one of the lovelier ones. At 9am on a Monday in springtime, it’s already buzzing with activity. Well-groomed pedigree dogs tow their well-groomed pedigree owners around on long leads; joggers and power walkers are out in force; wading birds busily forage on the foreshore. On a clear day you can see all the way to Corfe Castle across the world’s second-largest natural harbour (after Sydney, Australia). It’s a bit hazy today, but still the view, which is central to this case, is pretty good.
And yet Whitecliff Park is the scene of two shocking double murders. Most recently, during the night of 15 February, an attack left two dead on Turks Lane, along the southeastern edge of the park. Six months earlier, two much-loved elderly residents – fine, upstanding pillars of the community – were poisoned to death on Whitecliff Road, at the top of the park. In a statement Dorset Police said: “Officers carried out inquiries into these incidents; however, no arrests have been made.”
It could have been worse: the victims could have been people. They are – were – trees: two sycamores and a pair of English oaks. John Challinor, who chairs the local Parkstone Bay Residents Association, still considers it murder, though. “If you deliberately kill, that’s murder, isn’t it?” he says.
We’ll come to Challinor, and the sycamores. But first to those oaks, which Steve Cox calculates were around 80 years old. Cox used to be the council’s senior tree officer; now he runs an aboricultural consulting firm in Poole. He has worked with the trees around here for more than 20 years. He points up to the branches of the neighbouring trees in the line of oaks bursting into life, then at two dark skeletons that will never wake from winter again.
We go closer, up to the trunk of one of them, where Cox points out a small dark circle, about a metre above the ground, and another, and another – five or six in total, around the trunk. The same marks are on the other tree. Drill holes. A twig poked into one of them goes in about 10cm, angled downwards. That’s where the poison was injected. Most probably a horticultural glyphosate herbicide such as Roundup, he reckons, but he’s heard of bleach and diesel being used. You don’t need a chainsaw to kill a tree and the internet will quickly tell you how.
Cox explains that the drill holes take the poison into the live vessels in the most recent few years of growth, under the bark. “The wood cells are oriented vertically, so each one of those vessels is a long tube connecting the root system to the leaves, sucking up nutrients and water the whole time. If you drill into those vessels and introduce a poison, that can disrupt the tree’s transport system and its growth processes to the extent that the tree dies. You’re disrupting the connection between the root and the leaf. If it was Roundup, it’s designed to go down into the root system as well as up, so it’s a very effective way of killing a tree.” Put like that, it certainly sounds like murder.
Cox is down to earth, matter of fact, practical. He knows that in urban areas the relationship between trees and humans can be a delicate balance, and it needs to be managed, but he will list the benefits of trees at any opportunity. “We know they’re providing oxygen and taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, soaking up water, reducing storm surge levels, filtering pollution from the air. Trees are fabulous organisms that do all of those things effortlessly, it seems.”
Does he love trees? “Yeah. Trees have given me a career. I love spending time with them and learning about them. Our work can be stressful, but also I’m looking at trees, which is therapy.” As well as loving the trees here in Dorset, he has lived and worked with trees in Cameroon and the Solomon Islands and has written a book on urban tree management (as well as a novel). I think if you drilled into Cox, sap might come out, and if you sawed him in half there would be rings: 63 of them.
To a motive, then. “You’ve got to ask who would benefit from these trees dying and it’s people who would get an improved view of the harbour,” says Cox, looking up from the base of the trees to the houses behind, on Whitecliff Road. They’re mostly newbuilds, and of a certain style: lots of glass, big, brash and boxy.
I don’t find anyone at home in the house directly behind the dead trees, but you could say that several houses might benefit from their removal, including a development under construction further back. A little way along the road, a couple washing their cars say they heard about the trees but they’ve only just moved in. Anyway, it doesn’t affect them – the oaks don’t go this far along; they’ve got some low scrubby bushes in front of them, which they like because they screen the playground in the park without taking away the harbour view. No, they wouldn’t like to give their names.
How much is a view worth? A lot, around here. A house with a good view on Whitecliff Road can go for £2m-£2.5m, says Adrian Dunford, director of Tailor Made estate agents up the road in Sandbanks, where the houses sell for even more. “A house with no view there? Probably £1.5m. A house with a tree in front of it has probably got a partial view, but the gain in value by removing the tree might be about 20%.” Not bad for a quiet night’s work, with a drill and a bottle of Roundup.
Of course the trees also play a big part in making the area so desirable. “It’s that sylvan setting,” says Dunford, slipping into estate-agent speak. “The tranquility of being surrounded by trees, and having tree-lined avenues, it all adds to the pleasure of living in the area.” Just with a hefty dollop of Not-In-My-Front-Garden. “There’s always been a pressure to remove trees in order to gain more housing development, or to make a house larger, or to improve a view,” he says.
Cox has never known a prosecution for an attack on a tree in a public space, which is classed as vandalism. Nick Perrins, current head of planning at BCP council which covers Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, says it’s hard “unless you’ve got some evidence from CCTV cameras, or someone’s seen it.” No one is surprised that no arrests have been made for the Whitecliff Park killings.
You’re much more likely to get caught killing a tree on your own land. Trees on private land are often protected by Tree Preservation Orders made by the local authority. A TPO is a recognition that a tree has some presence in the locality and provides some public amenity. A TPO map of the Poole area shows thousands of individual trees marked. “Trees are a really important part of the character of our area, they’re a key part of why it’s so beautiful and special,” Nick Perrins tells me. Unauthorised pruning or felling of protected trees is a criminal offence that can lead to prosecution.
Of course, attacks on trees on both private and public land aren’t limited to one affluent corner of Dorset. It’s difficult to put numbers to the issue, because some of it just comes under vandalism, and records of TPO breaches are kept by local authorities, of which there are 333 in England alone. A trawl of local papers and websites throws up incidents in Newlyn in Cornwall or Beverley in Yorkshire, and any number of other places. But a day spent with Steve Cox confirms that Poole is certainly a hotspot.
After inspecting the poisoned oaks at Whitecliff, Cox takes me on a little tour of some other recent crime scenes in the area. To the Lilliput district first, and a large detached house on a road called Avalon. The owner, a retired accountant named Robert Page, had agreed to sell the property to a developer who was going to knock it down and build a block of luxury flats. But the lucrative deal fell through when planning was refused, one of the reasons being a 20-metre Monterey Pine in the garden. The 65-year-old tree, described as “huge and historic”, had been under a tree protection order since 1989. Page applied to have the tree felled, claiming it was a risk, but this was turned down, too.
Guess what? Not long afterwards the hitherto healthy tree began to wither and die. Cox’s company was involved in the council investigation, which found that herbicide had been injected into drill holes and concrete poured around the roots, and led to prosecution. Now, the tree is gone: it eventually toppled on to the roof of a garage block during Storm Arwen last November. But its ghost lives on in Google Maps street view, blackened and shrivelled, poisoned not by Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un but by a retired accountant.
At the trial at Salisbury Crown Court in December, Nick Cotter, prosecuting, told the jury: “When you start placing the evidence together it becomes like dead wood on the shoulders of Mr Page, weighing him down.” Page claimed a vigilante had come onto his property and killed the tree. The jury said that was rubbish. Sentencing him, Judge Robert Pawson branded Page “arrogant”, said he had “murdered” the Monterey Pine, and “lied through his teeth over its demise”. He went on: “That tree cast a literal shadow over your house and garden. Now that tree casts a metaphorical shadow over you and your family.” I think Judge Pawson might have quite enjoyed that one.
Page was found guilty, and ordered to pay £80,000: £25,000 in court costs, five grand for the loss in public benefit, and perhaps most significantly, £50,000 for the amount his property had gained in value through the loss of the tree.
“We’ve always had a pretty good record of taking action where needed,” says the council’s Nick Perrins. “Everyone understands the trees are special – therefore we tend to have people reporting things to the council, and we will respond to them.” You might think you can get away with cutting down that yew you don’t like in your own garden, but your neighbour may well dob you in.
Next, we’re off to Sandbanks proper, home to some of Britain’s most expensive real estate, and another crime scene. In 2019, businessman Trevor Beale had two Scots pines hacked back at the rear of his luxury home because they shaded his patio and balconies. One of the trees was actually in his neighbour’s garden. Beale claimed an overzealous tree surgeon had got carried away, but pleaded guilty to two charges of contravening tree preservation regulations. He was fined £2,700, plus £15,000 court costs, and the judge ordered him to pay back £40,500, the calculated value Beale’s crime had added to his property.
And there’s more: a £7,500 fine for a man who tried over a year to kill a large pine tree in his mother’s Sandbanks garden by pouring Jeyes fluid over it; attacks on the trees along Panorama Road – the list goes on. Everyone I speak to here thinks it’s a big issue in the area, and getting bigger. I’m going to come out and say it: Poole is the tree murder capital of Britain. The leafier and wealthier parts of Poole, anyway. And I wonder if there’s a connection, between the wealth and the tree crime. “Trees are such a big issue in this area,” says Cox. “There are so many of them and so many people, and the people have got a lot of money. If it was a destitute area there would be less money thrown at the issue.”
John Challinor – chair of the Parkstone Bay Residents Association, remember – agrees. “You get some people who feel, quite frankly: I’ve got some money, I can do what I like.’” I’ve returned to Whitecliff Harbourside Park to see the remains of its two other victims – young sycamores felled during the night of 15 February. Challinor, along with local councillor Ann Stribley, and Michele Beesley of the Whitecliff volunteers group, have brought me to where they stood, now just a couple of sorry stumps, about 15cm across. The cuts are quite smooth; Stribley thinks they were felled using a handsaw. “There were no bits – a chainsaw always leaves bits. And no one heard a thing.” Stribley, who has represented the area for more than 40 years, says attacks on trees are definitely on the increase.
“When I saw what had happened, I was appalled,” says Beesley, who has lived here since 1956 and walks in the park every day. “I couldn’t believe anyone would have the nerve to do that. It’s vandalism. We have enough trouble with youths and antisocial behaviour – actually, this is worse: how can you expect them to behave if adults are doing this?”
“We pay council tax,” says Challinor. “The council works hard to maintain really lovely outside spaces for people, and then someone decides they don’t care, they’d rather have a nice view. It’s selfish, whether it’s a homeowner or a developer – either way, it’s purely for their own gain.”
For Stribley, blocking the view was one of benefits of the trees, but she is looking in the other direction. “To block the view of the horrid houses,” she says, with a shudder. Not a fan of boxy, brash architecture, I think.
The houses along Turks Lane behind the sycamore stumps are indeed boxy newbuilds, more modest than some I’ve seen today. The most recent to sell went for a mere £1.25m. None of them benefits massively from the removal of the trees – a bit of extra view, maybe, but only of the park, not of the water. Still, I nervously ring the bell of the house directly behind where the trees stood.
A woman comes to the door, buzzes open the gate. Her name is Cassandra. She’s been here a year. She says she knows nothing about the demise of the sycamores, but that the falling seeds were a nuisance, and had cut her daughter’s face. Nor is she after a bigger or better view; her living room is at the back of the house, and as I can see, she keeps the curtains closed on this side. She does say something about cultural attitudes to trees and people in different places. In Hong Kong, where she is from, they put people before trees: “Here, plants are more important than the people.”
***
A few weeks later and I’m getting strong deja vu. I’m back in Dorset, talking to another man named Steve who knows a lot about trees. We’re in another bit of the county, Charminster, near Dorchester, and Steve Maros, arboricultural manager of Dorset county council, is telling me about some more trees that have been killed, deliberately – murdered, you might say.
It seems this crime wave has spread, like the poison itself, and is infecting the entire county. I went to see one of the victims on the way here – a lime tree on Court Orchard Road in Bridport. If the killing of the oaks in Poole, with their drill holes and poison injection, represents a scientific approach to the crime, then this is the opposite: crude butchery. The lime, which is 50 or 60 years old, has been hacked with a hatchet, all the way round the circumference of the trunk, “to stop the translocation of water and nutrients up and down the tree”, Maros tells me. It’s called ring-barking.
The tree won’t survive, even if there are still some signs of life. “But we have left it up just to spite him, until it gets to the stage where it becomes dangerous. Once the timber dies it becomes brittle and is a health and safety issue.”
It sounds as if he knows who did it. “We nearly always know who it is,” says Maros. “But unless you catch them red handed it’s impossible to prove. And neighbours don’t want to get involved.” Five years ago they used to see the odd case. “In the last couple of years there’s been a massive increase,” he says. And he shows me a list of attacks – poisonings and ring-barkings – from the past year: a birch in Coventry Close in Corfe Mullen; Churchill Close in Sturminster Marshall (although that one, another lime, survived); Woodroffe Meadow in Lyme Regis; Noake Road in Sherborne; several in Weymouth, in Alexandra Road, the Southill estate, Belle Vue Road. “Not surprisingly, many of those were to do with blocking a view of the sea,” Maros says.
Why this sudden surge? “I think during lockdown a lot of people were sitting at home thinking, ‘We keep asking the council to get rid of that tree. They won’t do it so I’m going to take matters into my own hands.’ I think, in general, society is taking things into its own hands. We certainly get more Mr Angrys on the phone than we ever did before.” Mrs Angrys, too, he adds.
Does he have any sympathy for the people whose light and views are blocked? “None whatsoever. The tree was often there long before the house. We find people will buy a house with a massive tree on the pavement outside. It’s not hidden – they must have seen it when they looked at the house. Then, within a week or two, the phone rings. ‘Oh hello, we just bought this house with a big tree outside, can you come and fell it because it’s blocking the light?’ And I say, ‘Well, no.’”
Maros, and Dorset county council, are asking anyone with information about attacks to get in touch with the arboriculture department. They’ve had some responses, but nothing that is going to lead to prosecution, and again Dorset has never seen a successful prosecution of an attack on a council tree. Maros would like to see justice done, in the way that it has been for people cutting down trees on their property. “I think you’ve only got to make a couple of examples for the message to get across that this is actually not acceptable. At the end of the day, it’s criminal damage, like putting a brick through someone’s window. They would expect to get fined or taken to court for that. Trees are no different and they are public assets.”
I wonder if he knows what they’ve done in a couple of places in Australia in an effort to curb the same problem? When 200 new street trees were removed or damaged in the Perth suburb of Stirling, the local authority started to put up signs in front of houses saying that a tree had been vandalised outside this property: publicly branding the culprits. “If someone has lopped a tree purely and simply to get a view of the city it is quite obvious it’s the owner of the property,” Stirling’s mayor Giovanni Italiano told a local radio station. “If we can’t prove who it was, the sign will go up and stay there for 12 months.”
On the other side of the country, at Blacks Beach in Queensland, when 40 trees were illegally axed in order to open up a view to the ocean, Mackay regional council erected huge billboards in their place. You take away the trees to get a better view, we take away that view. There’s something delightfully direct about both approaches – shame ’em and block ’em. Maros, who hadn’t heard about it, seems to approve of the Aussie tactics.
On the way home I stop off once more at Whitecliff Park in Poole, scene of the poisoned oaks. Of all the tree attacks I’ve seen and heard about, these are the most upsetting – because of their scale, and age, and because they were part of an ancient row that is now so rudely interrupted. They’re still standing – no one’s getting a tree-free view yet. But with the other oaks in the row now in full leaf, their demise is even more stark – a pair of black ghost ships in an armada in full sail.
As I approach, I can see the ivy has started to take over, creeping up and around, covering the drill holes, hiding the evidence. A flock of crows – a murder of crows, fittingly – has taken up residence in one of the two and is adding to the macabre mood by cawing menacingly.
Hang on, though: the other, the bigger of the two trees, has a fuzz of pale green about one of its lower branches. Not ivy, but actual growth. Oak leaves. It doesn’t look healthy at all – the leaves are blotchy, wrinkled, sickly. And it is only one branch. I’m sure the fate of the tree is sealed and this is a last gasp rather than a new breath. But this one old oak isn’t quite dead yet.
