SIR – Re your report (T&A, April 2) on a new Forestry Commission grant scheme to encourage local landowners to plant trees.

Well, two cheers for that! It would be three, if only there were a guarantee that some time in the next ten years someone would come back to remove the tree guards. Sadly, it is almost guaranteed that no-one will – ever.

So, these trees will join the millions of others all over this otherwise fair land, which are being choked, soaked, strangled and generally mutilated by their former guards. That is the trees that are alive.

Many guards stand empty and have become just so much entrenched litter in the countryside.

Anyone can liberate a tree. All you need for the plastic guards is a Stanley knife, though the more tenacious wire ones need wire cutters or secateurs. Instead of, ‘Plant a tree in 83!’ (Remember that?), the call should be, ‘Let our woods be clean by 2013!’.

Jim Flood, Tree Liberation Front (Bradford Branch), Park Terrace, Saltaire