Grange Gardens disaster

It seems that a junta of Great Aunts, or a corroboree of militant hairdressers has enacted a coup-d'etat upon the Grange Gardens, covering everything with doilies, fencing off whatever might reward touching, and trimming, shearing, cutting, chopping, layering and indeed felling a variety of entirely defenceless trees.

The great charm of the Grange (as she is known), an area which long has acted as everyone's front garden in handkerchief-gardened Lewes, has always been a faded gentility, and although the loss of the large tulip trees was much regretted it was at least justified on the grounds of its indisputable death. No such defence can be offered for the destruction of two of the four trees beside the Winterbourne where generations of small children have been able to engage in almost harmless imaginings within multi-trunked thickets. Or thinnets, at the least. Even the gracious magnolia grandiflora by the tea-room hatch has been thinned and reduced from its former luxuriance, last year having been one of its most productive as measured in pale waxy intoxicating flowers and furry microphone stubs. And then the fences! Ugly, stupid, temporary looking picket fencing has migrated from place to place over the past few years. It lines the (no doubt Health and Safety provoking) Winterbourne and long encircled and besieged the vulnerable mulberry. The remnants of the depleted thickets have now been surrounded by such a fence, protecting a measly range of municipal planting which threatens to reduce the Grange to a sort of Eastbourne.