This is your song:

LEAVE THEM A FLOWER
(Wally Whyton)

Leave them a flower, some grass and a hedgerow
A hill and a valley, a view to the sea
These things are not yours to destroy as you want to
A gift given once for eternity

I speak on behalf of the next generation
My sons and daughters, their children to come
What will you leave them for their recreation
An oil slick, a pylon, an industrial slum

You plunder and pillage, you tear and you tunnel
Trees lying toppled, roots finger the sky
Building a land for machines and computers
In the name of progress the farms have to die

Fish in the ocean polluted and poisoned
The sand on the beaches stinking and black
And you with your tankers, your banks and investments
Say, Never worry, the birds will come back

When the last flower has dropped its last petal
When the last concrete is finally laid
The moon will shine cold on a nightmarish landscape
Your gift to your children, this world that you made

And a few notes:

[1971:] As the song took shape, it became, in Wally's words, "a plea that we should leave some part of our world the way God made it - for our children. Otherwise, they will have nothing. They will have highways, they will have oil slicks - thirty or forty miles wide - with the dirt and filth that seems to be part of our industrial society. No one admits to being responsible for halting this pollution of our rivers or our countryside - the filth- making continues and all everybody does is pass the buck". (Frank Kofsky, notes Wally Whyton, 'Leave Them A Flower')

[1975:] The song was triggered by a single line. A two hundred year old oak tree was cut down near me to build a house. As I walked past it, I mentally wrote, Trees lying toppled, roots finger the sky. The song was then built backwards and forwards. The verse was composed to the melody of The Streets of Laredo - so that the words might seem to be familiar, against a traditional tune. (Wally Whyton in a letter to his publishers, 27 Oct)

Written for the European Conservation Year (1970?).

See also the resurrected thread on the Exxon Valdez disaster.

I once wrote to Wally, who was then doing his 'Folk Review' on the radio, and asked him about the song that I'd found in an English text book. I still have the tape with him and Colin Irwin, after playing the song, talking about it being 'issued by the Edison Label on a ??? cylinder, recorded by another ancient relic, Walter Whyton'. Great fun! That show was my earliest source for British folk music as a teenager. - Susanne