What Is A Tree?

A judge has taken 12,000 words to provide a ruling in answer to the above question, as reported in the Telegraph today.

In his ruling he concludes "with tree preservation orders there are no limitations in terms of size for what is to be treated as a tree. In other words, saplings are trees".

So the remaining 11,973 other words were not really necessary then?

When accusations are made that recourse to the law is over-used, might this particular instance be a case where the ruling could have been 'trunkated' and the whole question basically 'leafed' alone, to be settled by the use of common sense?