landscape-design
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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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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…
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‘They put up a parking lot’ (but kept the palms): The Wallaceville Phoenix palm cluster
In the previous post we saw several examples of rows and double avenues of Phoenix palms. One resource that helped me in putting together the examples was aerial photographs. Older photos can be sourced from Retrolens or DigitalNZ websites, and of course Google Maps is very useful for recent aerial photography. The site described in…
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Monumental: A Phoenix Palm Gallery
In the last post we got acquainted with the ‘colonnade effect’ of rows or double avenues of Phoenix palms. I quickly moved to look at a case study of the redevelopment of Whanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery, and glossed over the history of the Phoenix palm in New Zealand, partly because I’ve already written several blogs and…
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The Colonnade Effect: Rows and Double Avenues of Phoenix Palms
We’ve come across a few Phoenix palms (Phoenix canariensis) in previous posts and I promised to write more on them. The use of the palm in New Zealand has a long and varied history, so to keep this post short I’ll refer readers to some earlier posts on the topic (in another blog), and to…
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‘Heavy-shouldered children of the wind’: Shaping Macrocarpa
In ‘Photogenic ‘beat-up macs‘ I quoted this line from Jeffers’ poem Granite and Cypress: ‘White-maned, wide-throated, the heavy-shouldered children of the wind leap at the sea-cliff’ (1925, quoted by Weick). This powerful expression needs contextualising: the poet is celebrating the tree in Monterey Peninsula, a landscape different to where most macrocarpa are found in New…
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The Monkey Puzzler
In the course of searching for historical information on the Norfolk Island Pines of Patea Cemetery (see the previous post) I came across an article discussing ‘the shelter problem’ in the Patea region. The anonymous author uses phrases like ‘salt-storms’ and ‘southerly busters’ to convey a serious wind problem. After suggesting that ‘it behoves. all…
The Local Arboretum: Noticeable trees and their stories 