“Just read your article,” he wrote. “Is there nothing we can do to save these trees? I’m open to direct action provided I’m not left out on a limb.

“Seriously, do you know if many feel the same about preserving nature and our beautiful town?”

He signed the note, “Roland of Gage,” which made me think of a guy in a chainmail tunic, iron helmet, metal breastplate and gauntlets dismounting and clanging into Hendriks Independent Grocer.

Well, Roland and many others were outraged to read in this pathetic column that the town planned on massacring 41 of those gorgeous, ancient trees that arch over Mississagua Street as it enters the Old Town heritage district (“The Turner Report: Massacre on Mississagua,” April 23).

It’s progress that, in this case, means rebuilding an iconic local road so more tourists can wobble down the sides on special bike lanes. Along the way, the road will be widened, rebuilt, fitted with a new watermain and sewers, sidewalks and safety buffers between cars and sometimes-inebriated, cycle-renting, out-of-practice riders from the nether regions of the GTA.

At the only public reveal of the finished plans, the tree slaughter was downplayed. After that event I asked officials if negative public comments had been taken into account.

“Staff and the project consultants are currently reviewing the feedback received,” town spokesperson Marah Minor told me. “No changes are currently in effect as this is in the review and design phase.”

With 41 wooden souls in the balance, we ripped the town a new one.

“Over the coming months the Niagara Region will be tearing up Niagara Stone Road. The town will be shutting down Mississagua. That means the kanga line of dump trucks going to the Big Dig at the Royal George will be diverting though Old Town residential streets,” this column hissed.

“Why do people flock here to visit? To live in this bucolic burg? For the quiet, the history, the architecture, the streetscapes, the geography — and the green above us. These are the intangibles making life in this place unique inside a world of chaotic change, conflict and AI slop.”

Yeah, we can live with 41 fewer trees, we said. But not the same.

Well, apparently, we have news.

The plan presented to locals at the end of March has been redrawn. The arboreal genocide has been rethought. When the tree guys are finished and before the dozers move in, there will be 17 stumps instead of 41.

“This change is the result of design modifications, technical review and feedback received through the public engagement process,” Minor tells me. “Consideration of tree preservation has been part of the discussion since the early stages of the project, including during council meeting discussions in 2023, where council emphasized the importance of maintaining the neighbourhood’s character and retaining trees where possible.”

Construction is set to begin sometime this summer and carry on through the winter. It will coincide with the weeks-long demolition of the Royal George Theatre (after a legal challenge ends), followed by seven months of digging and earth removal from that site on the main drag.

Hundreds of loads are planned. Every single dump truck will now rumble through streets lined with heritage homes, instead of up Mississagua, as planned.

Chaos.

But wait. The town says that despite widening the roadway, installing new lanes, chopping trees and catering to a greater volume of tourist traffic, that “the heritage look and feel will be maintained.”

How so? “With the use of swales and ditches.” Seriously. Heritage ditches. Oh, and we get new streetlights on posts with decorative tops. Like in Virgil. And Disney World.

Okay, I know. It’s just a road. But when added to the hulking Parliament Oak hotel plunked into a residential hood, the 55,000-foot Royal George mega-complex where heritage structures once stood, the insane plan to turn the old hospital into a tourist parking garage (instead of, you know, a hospital), the coming Hummel hotel on Queen, all those new townhouses in St. Davids, the condo towers of Glendale and the Virgil construction site where 700 pines once stood, you have to ask: how much is enough? Who left the gate open?

This place is in danger of being loved to death.

But thank you. For pardoning the trees.

Garth Turner is a NOTL resident, journalist, author, wealth manager and former federal MP and minister. garth@garth.ca