botanical-curiosity
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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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Acorns from Great Windsor Park: Royalty and 160 years of Commemorative Tree Planting. Part 2
This Libocedrus plumosa (kawaka) hasn’t grown much since it was planted in May 2023 in Lower Hutt’s Anzac Lawn to mark the coronation of King Charles. Hopefully it will flourish, and if it does the current plaque will presumably be moved to the base of the tree, as is common practice. It is a New…
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Acorns from Windsor Great Park: Royalty and 160 years of Commemorative Tree Planting. Part 1
On 6 May 2023 when King Charles III was crowned, New Zealand was still not a republic, consequently it was understandable that much was done to mark the coronation. The then Prime Minister (Chris Hipkins) and Governor General (Cindy Kiro) travelled to London to attend the coronation ceremonies, but about two weeks prior Chris Hipkins…
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‘Better by the Dozen’: The Mexican fan palm in early New Zealand gardens. Part 2
In part 1 of this post I took some poetic license with ‘better by the dozen’, but we can start here with a case where there are literally a dozen palms under consideration. Consider this extract from an article in the Wanganui Herald: Mr Heinold lived at 3 Blythe Street, which is near the top…
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‘Better by the Dozen’: The Mexican fan palm in early New Zealand gardens. Part 1
Without much by way of intentional planning, we’ve been getting through the main palms that featured in early New Zealand gardens. Strangely though, I’ve left out the Mexican fan palm, even though it has at times been right before my eyes. For example, consider one of the ‘Arrowsmith photos’ first presented in The Arrowsmith Phoenix…
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Announcement: A long read on a famous row of Phoenix palms
There have been several posts in this blog on various aspects of the Phoenix palm. The number of these is partly because I spent at least a year, from about 2023, researching the spread of the palm in New Zealand. The posts herein have been kept relatively short, but readers who are still interested can…
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‘Count Yourself Lucky’: The Surviving Redwood of Pine Ave, Upper Hutt
In previous posts I’ve commented that Wellington (where I live) is not a well-treed city. But only 30 kilometres away in Upper Hutt, things look different, at least on the surface. We saw in the previous post (‘Hardly extraordinary …’) that in 1992 a lot of effort went into transplanting16 Chinese fan palms in Upper…
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Hardly Extraordinary, Nonetheless Heavily Planted: A Brief History of the Chinese Fan Palm in New Zealand
In the last post we learnt that in1865 Sir George Grey sent nikau palms to Ferdinand von Mueller – the Australian government botanist – who then distributed them about the globe. This obviously suited both men: von Mueller furthered his plant exchanges, and as an ‘amateur botanist’ Grey must have felt he was making a…
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‘Fine specimens of nikau palm, fern trees and tai tai’: On early use of the ‘New Zealand palm’
As I noted in the first post on the Arrowsmith Phoenix palms, a worldwide ‘palm craze’ spread among garden enthusiasts from the 1850s on. British migrants brought this with them to the colonies where they settled, including New Zealand. At times this led to an appreciation of the nikau (Rhopalostylis sapida), but relative to the…
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‘A Small Act of Collective Memory’: The Memorial Oak Avenue in Gladstone
Trees have been used as memorials for centuries. It is no surprise then that with the end of both 20th century world wars service people were commemorated by the planting of trees, either singly or in groups. The latter were often planted by roadsides and became known as ‘memorial avenues’. Here we’ll visit a memorial…
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Sewers, Roots, and Sneaky Councils: Eastbourne’s Rimu Street Norfolk Island Pine Saga
In previous posts I’ve often used images sourced from DigitalNZ to show something of the history of trees of interest. I’m not the only one who finds this resource useful as the following photo shows: This view looks south-eastward along Rimu Street in the Wellington seaside suburb of Eastbourne. It shows a good example of…
The Local Arboretum: Noticeable trees and their stories 