amenity-horticulture
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The Local Arboretum: An introduction
By definition an arboretum is a specific place where trees of the world or of a specific country are collected for public viewing. Adding local seems to complicate that understanding. There is good reason for it though: the premise here is that even a single tree, looked at in-situ, can open up the same interests…
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A ‘Grand [and lucky] Old Rhododendron’
I’m reading Barefoot Years, Martin Edmond’s wonderful account of his childhood in Ohakune. He starts by reflecting on the childhood game of answering ‘what’s the first thing you remember?’ It’s a difficult task but it gets easier when he describes the second house his family lived in while his father was a teacher in Ohakune.…
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The Arrowsmith Phoenix Palms. Part 4: Gisborne and the Pest Plant Status
In the last post on the Arrowsmith Phoenix Palms (Part 3: Partial Removals in Hastings) we saw what happened to the Phoenix palms Donald Arrowsmith photographed in Hastings in 1962. Unfortunately, it was discovered that by 2005 only one out of five palms remained. Development work and the siting of a new war memorial statue…
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Some Rural Pines from a Wairarapa Trip
Recently I spent a week in the Wairarapa, based at Martinborough. To get there I took the train from Wellington to Featherston and then biked the 18 kilometres to Martinborough. While biking through Featherston I couldn’t help but notice two large Pinus radiata about which I made a mental note: ‘worth further attention’. Returning to…
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The Arrowsmith Phoenix Palms. Part 3. Partial Removals in Hastings
In part 2 we jumped forward 63 years from when Donald Arrowsmith took his photographs in various locations which happened to also have Phoenix palms. We considered four cases where the palms were no longer growing due to the consequences of development. Below we’ll consider the interesting case of Photograph 258 – Street Scene in…
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The Arrowsmith Phoenix Palms. Part 2 Sixty-three years later …
Unless affected by disease or pests, the Phoenix palm can live for 200 to 300 years. This means that even if the first plantings (late 1800s) in New Zealand were still growing they would still be relatively young. There is a strong chance that the oldest specimen would be in Auckland, not too far from…
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The Arrowsmith Phoenix Palms. Part 1. An Extraordinary Resource
It is well known that New Zealand has only one endemic palm, the nikau (genus Rhopalostylis with several species). It has come up in a few posts within this blog, but more commonly discussed have been Phoenix palms (Phoenix canariensis) and the Chinese fan palm (Trachycarpus fortunei). This weighting is not due to dislike of…
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Some ‘Great Pines’ of Wellington
Paul Cézanne, one of the most original artists of the impressionist movement, produced a number of ‘tree paintings’. Perhaps the most well-known, painted over the six years of 1890-96, is The Great Pine based on a tree in Provence: Source: Paul Cézanne, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons There are a number of pine species endemic…
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The Leaning Araucarian: A Tree Mystery
‘Araucarian’ sounds like some kind of alien, but actually it is a term used for members of the Araucaria family. We’ve met a few representatives in previous posts: Norfolk Island pines (A. heterophylla), which are very common in New Zealand, particularly in the North Island; the Monkey Puzzle tree (A. araucana) from Chile and Argentina,…
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Outstanding in the Paddock: A Pauahatanui Macrocarpa
As readers of previous posts will know, I’ve grown fond of macrocarpas in all the shapes and sizes they manifest in the New Zealand landscape. This short post reports on another one I recently chanced upon. I had walked up to the historic St Alban’s Church in Pauahatanui which sits atop a small hill, and…
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A Canary Island Combo
The last few posts have been on Phoenix palms, and we’ll return to the question of why their removal is now increasingly common, but before that a bit of an interlude is useful. This will focus on a different tree endemic to the Canary Islands – Dracaena draco – but just by chance there were…
The Local Arboretum: Noticeable trees and their stories 