Newly-planted trees on Hanoi's Nguyen Chi Thanh Street are dying in the current summer heat wave just three months after being planted, leaving little shade for residents.

Most of the trees are failing to grow and cracks are appearing in their trunks. Those that have managed to sprout leaves lose them quickly. Locals think they are already dead.

Ha Anh Tuan, a local on Nguyen Chi Thanh Street said, "We often water the trees, hoping they would grow quickly and give us shades, but they are withering away."

Hanoi authorities cut down all the trees on Nguyen Chi Thanh Street in March and replaced them with an allegedly hardier species under a project to replace 6,700 trees in the capital.

The mass felling stirred public outcry and was halted.

The Department of Construction said the trees replaced on Nguyen Chi Thanh Street were manglietia dandyi, but scientists and city inspectors later found they were manglietia conifera.

Nguyen Lan Dung, the chairman of the Vietnam Society for Biology, said neither species was suitable for urban areas, especially given the hot temperatures and poor soil of Hanoi.

Newly-planted trees have no branches or leaves

Capital heat worsened without trees

Cracks in new tree trunks