A blog by Will Ellis
If a tree falls in the urban forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
In most residential gardens in Scotland, the owner can decide to remove a tree at any time, unbound by any regulatory oversight. However, as explained in our first blog post, Merchiston and Greenhill’s designation as a conservation area (MGCA) puts owners under specific obligations. In particular, any tree work (other than exempt works like woodland thinning) has to be notified to the local authority.
Under the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997 as amended [1], the City ofEdinburgh Council (CEC) has the power to prevent any proposed tree works in the MGCA and Edinburgh’s other conservation areas through the imposition of a Tree Preservation Order (TPO). In law, a TPO can be applied if the protection of a tree or group of trees would be ‘expedient in the interests of amenity’ and/or if the tree(s) are of ‘cultural or historic significance’.
The legal records of this regulatory process are open to public view through the City Council’s planning portal. These records give us the opportunity to inspect the phenomena of garden tree removals within the MGCA from a more social and inclusive perspective. With the added benefit of interviews with local residents, planners, and tree professionals, I was able to pick up on the finer details of the processes underpinning potential changes in trees in the area that cannot be captured by satellite observation and ground-level surveying. As far as I know, this analysis constitutes the first attempt, anywhere in Scotland, to use evidence synthesis methods to assess movements in tree volume within a conservation area.
As part of my study into the MGCA’s garden trees, I sampled tree work notifications from the CEC’s planning database, extracting important summary information. The following insights were made using data from 2015, 2018, 2021, and 2024
1. Almost all requests to remove trees were unopposed by the local authority.
Since online records began in 2014, only three of some 900 tree work notifications prompted a decision (as of January 2026) to make a TPO. A digital map of all the current TPOs in our district is available here – https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/planning-13/privately-owned-trees-woodlands . Of the 163 notifications that I sampled, 80 of them contained (unopposed) notifications concerning the removal of trees (i.e. to take them down rather than to prune or otherwise modify them), accounting for 136 trees removed in total. Basic extrapolation methods suggest that around 750 trees might have been removed from the MGCA’s private gardens alone since 2014. There is no firm data about how many trees may have been newly planted in gardens in that period.
Local Tree with a TPO applied to it [2]
Despite this, records suggest that the absolute number of notifications for felling has remained pretty steady across the years. At the same time, the number of overall notifications has increased, indicating that owners are proposing more maintenance work on trees, rather than removal. A further point to note is that the business of tree felling appears to be concentrated in a relatively small number of arboricultural businesses.How should we interpret these figures? Are they a cause for worry or satisfaction? Are gardens now relieved of diseased or dying trees or are we losing healthy specimens and thinning the urban canopy? Viewed one way, given the growing proportion of non-felling activity, the figures indicate positive progress towards the conservation of the urban forests, with residents in the conservation area making decisions well aligned with the ethic of projects like the “One Million Tree City” project.
Viewed another way, instances where healthy and mature trees have been taken down might suggest that alternatives to felling and options for tree replacement need to be more fully understood and practised if the characteristics of the conservation area are to be preserved.
2. The use of arboricultural professionals is becoming more commonplace
A clearly promising trend found throughout the sample is the increasing use of arboricultural professionals in garden management. In each year, the share of requests written by professional “agents” on behalf of garden owners has steadily increased. This trend further aligns with CEC guidance [3], perhaps indicating that best practices are being followed more often.
3. Trees were removed for a variety of reasons, which were often related
As reported by residents and agents, the most common reasons trees were removed were structural damage; death or disease; personal preference; garden management, and public safety. For 17 of the 80 notifications I sampled, no reason could be ascertained from online records. My interviews suggested a number of reasons for this. It may be that some data is missing from online records. Further, under the law as it currently stands, a local authority may have difficulty in proving public ‘amenity’ if the tree is not visible to anybody other than the owner of a garden. In these cases, a local authority may find it hard to establish grounds for protection and a resident may proceed to fell it on grounds of simple personal preference. Nonetheless, the absence of a justification for felling in such a substantial proportion of notifications may be a cause for concern.
| Reason | Times Mentioned in Notifications |
| Disease or Death | 31 |
| Subsistence Damage | 31 |
| Personal Preference | 14 |
| Garden Management | 12 |
| Public Safety | 8 |
In many cases, residents had more than one reason for removing a tree, but these were often linked together by ecological facts. For example, an older tree may be more susceptible to disease, making it less structurally sound and thus a threat to public safety. That same tree may also be quite large, threatening built structures or out-competing other plants in the garden.
My interviews suggested that public safety and property damage are the primary concern for local authorities. However, it was also made clear that if an individual was particularly motivated to get rid of one of their trees, a notification could be framed to emphasise these aspects.
Overall, this exercise has provided a glimpse into the social foundation of our urban forest, and fostered a more holistic perspective on our urban forest than can be supplied by environmental surveying alone. Our perceptions, judgements, and decisions concerning our trees are just as significant as their ecological characteristics.
In our next blog post – which draws on my discussions with the community – we will examine actors’ perspectives on the system we have begun to analyse here. Bringing this all together, we will explore what a “good” outcome might look like for garden tree management and the governance of the urban forest in Merchiston and Greenhill.
[1] Town & Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997, as amended by the Planning etc (Scotland) Act 2006; section 160
[2]https://citydev-portal.edinburgh.gov.uk/idoxpa-web/files/65206BAF9B40E7945B319FFC3AA0ECCE/23_03756_TCO-1_GREENHILL_COURT_EDINBURGH_TREE_WORKS_PHOTO_2-5963642.jpg
[3] The City of Edinburgh Council (2025b). Privately Owned Trees and Woodlands. https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/planning-13/privately-owned-trees-woodlands