PESHAWAR, Dec 22: Students of the Peshawar University’s botany department boycotted classes here on Monday to protest against the university administration’s move to uproot plants and trees in the botanical garden.

The administration uprooted the plants and cut trees last evening to start the bio-technology department’s construction.

The university administration recently decided to initiate work in connection with the new department’s building after holding a meeting with NWFP Governor Iftikhar Hussain Shah.

Terming destruction of plantation serious damage, students said that the botanical garden provided a convenient research facility for over 1,000 post-graduate students, a professor in the botany department said.

“This is an administrative issue. The botanical garden’s trees had been auctioned long ago and the contractor were required to have started work by now”, an official of the university’s administration said.

“There are no permanently-grown rare plant species there ... It (the botanical garden) is simply not true,” said the same official.

Trees which were chopped on Monday morning were Sarro and Orange trees which could hardly be labelled as “rare plant species,” the official insisted.

“It is simply a tussle over the chairmanship of the botany department and the bio-technology department ... The issue is being wrongly portrayed ... The botanical garden is not the real problem. The issue had been exaggerated,” another university official said.