HALF a mile from my home is one of those spots in the landscape, at the junction of two lanes, that needs a big arching tree to frame the view.

Doubtless 100 years ago there would have been one growing there; 11 years ago I planted an oak tree, with the agreement of the landowner. This year it reached a height of about 11 ft, well above the top of the hedge three ft in front of it. I have cut this hedge by hand, every year for 10 years, each side of the tree to avoid damage from hedgecutters and I was going to do it over Bank Holiday. Alas no more.

On the Friday an unthinking, uncaring clod on an oversized tractor put a hedgecutter straight through it leaving its shattered stump four ft high. He must have seen it, indeed his machine must have grunted as it went through the trunk. Destroying it serves no conceivable purpose; it was in nobody's way and well clear of visibility at the junction.

We live in one of the loveliest parts of what is still one of the loveliest counties in England. Do not take it for granted; today's beauty owes nothing to the present day.

Look at any photograph of the countryside pre-war and it was incomparably more beautiful. That beauty was achieved largely by hedgerow trees and they are going.

A rough survey of the 40 odd miles of hedgerows in Pudleston Parish reveals scarcely any tree under 70 years old, partly through elm disease but much more through hedge flail cutters, used ever-earlier in the year.

The hedgerow trees we admire today are the result of a countryman, laboriously cutting a hedge by hand and having the sensitivity to let a strong-growing oak or ash go on up and become a tree. Today's contractor on a big tractor leaves nothing except at a telegraph pole and cuts miles of hedgerow in a day.

We need urgently to establish a strategy that puts in physical barriers to enable new hedgerow trees to become established. That may mean brightly painted metal poles for perhaps a decade, as has been done in parts of Yorkshire; ugly and inconvenient but they work.

If we do nothing, the future landscape will be bleak indeed and future generations will not thank us.

DAVID TAYLOR, Pudleston, Leominster.