Former view of the wall trees.
Current view of the wall trees.
Eighteen odd mature banyans along the stone walls of the nullah in Lung Chu Street, Sham Shui Po were originally planned to be felled. CA conducted a green ribbon campaign on 20th March 2006 and urged the Drainage Services Department to withdraw the plan of felling the trees immediately.
The wall trees along the nullah possess significant ecological and cultural values, chopping them down amounts to a great loss to Hong Kong. The main reason of felling all those wall trees was to cover the nullah to solve the problem of bad odour. But the problem had actually been lessened a lot through the works of DSD by removing illegal dumping of contaminated water.
The Conservancy Association believed that the only way to solve the problem was to clean up the source of pollution, not to cover it up. After several meetings, DSD preliminary agreed that eight wall trees would be preserved.
DSD listened to our suggestion and rebuilt a stone wall using the bricks from the nullah. Information boards were installed next to the preserved wall trees. The whole project cost about 4 million dollars and was completed in October 2007. The covered nullah is now part of the Lung Chu Street Playground.
