Confessions of an IMBY

You know what NIMBY stands for? Not In My Back Yard. It's a very handy expression used to describe people who are all enthusiastic and excited about, say, wind power, but turn against it when someone suggests building a wind turbine up the road from their house. There are lots of Nimbys in the world.

But for today I'm an IMBY, and I have a sort of confession. Our back garden is tiny. It's miniscule. In fact it wouldn't look out of place if you unpeeled it and stuck it on an envelope in place of a stamp. It's the kind of garden you have when you live in an old terraced house on the side of a hill and most of it is hidden by an enormous tree. Whereas all our neighbours have nice little flowering cherry trees or funny shrubs covered in red dangly things, someone sometime decided to plant the world's hugest apple tree in our back garden. Left to its own devices it would probably be ten metres tall and just as wide. It's like an oak.

You can see where generations of desperate homeowners have hacked branches off this monster. I pruned it pretty severely a couple of winters ago and in the meantime it has grown and grown. Last summer the tree's dense foliage shaded the whole garden, more or less all day. On the plus side, though, it was a happy hang-out for our small local population of streetwise bluetits and blackbirds.

So I was torn. I venerate the tree - we've even wassailed it - but having written a book about orchards (Man-made Eden, published by Redcliffe Press) I know you shouldn't be sentimental about such things. I thought about having it cut down, then hit on a compromise, and instead gave it a really good pruning, I mean more or less a pollarding. It's about quarter the size now, but still alive, and the garden is light again.

The only losers are the bluetits and blackbirds. Of course I could say, well, it's just one tree, there's plenty of other places for them to go, and it could be true. But then I think of my neighbour who hacked down and burned every green thing in his back garden and turned it into a sort of box, with decking that stretches its length and breadth and a patio heater for decoration. And I think of all the other people in the city, and the county, and in England and over in Amazonia, people who need or want to tame their bit of nature to make their lives better.

But at least I didn't cut the tree down completely. It will grow back. The bugs are still there for the bluetits. Perhaps I've stumbled on a happy medium between the needs of nature and the desires of people. In My Back Yard.