buildings-and-pathways
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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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‘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…
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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…
The Local Arboretum: Noticeable trees and their stories 