Don Donovan: Revisionist view of future an absurdity

They are wonderful plants for holding sloping ground in place, in the front of the border, among shrubs and flowers, entranceway plantings to the house, around the swimming pool and in cool, green tropical plantings."

Thus spake Colin Hutchinson in The Art of Gardening published in 1991 and described as New Zealand's finest gardening book. The plant Mr Hutchinson was describing was agapanthus.

Only 15 years later that wonderful plant that graces our motorway medians and can fill a vase with a single head of blue or white blooms, is facing the chop because the biosecurity apparatchiks at government and local level have decided that they are invasive and/or poisonous and crowd out native plants.

Now, although agapanthus grows in all the otherwise dead spots of my garden, I don't know much about floriculture, and it's not the particular attack on those plants that bothers me.

What makes me nervous is that hiding inside the biosecurity police's statement is a politically correct, blinkered yet starry-eyed philosophy that New Zealand should outlaw anything that isn't native.

Not long ago moves were afoot to restore parts of Canterbury to its pristine, pre-pilgrim state. It was asserted that large areas of native bush had been supplanted by what is now the characteristic patchwork of British agriculture.

It was misleading to a degree and although it is true to say that Canterbury has undergone an enormous change, its farmlands have mainly replaced swampland and tussock.

The surveyor of Canterbury, Charles Torlesse, writing in 1849, described large areas of bush, but made much of a country the most part ready for the plough.

This revisionist urge to take New Zealand back to its beginnings is absurd. It has moved on, developed, improved, become productive.

Inevitably, in its forward march since human occupation around the 14th century, there have been casualties: moa, huia and other species have gone, and others are, or have been, under threat.

Some we can save, but the idea of returning New Zealand to a golden age by taking a huge, politically correct leap backwards is nonsensical.

To start with agapanthus is like sacking the tea lady at Fonterra to improve the bottom line.

And after agapanthus what? Rabbits, stoats, rats, cats, dogs, cattle, sheep, deer, trout, deciduous European trees? We'll have to get rid of them all. Maori, European, Pacific Islanders, Asiatics, they'll all have to go home.

But before they go we'll need to rip up the roads, wipe out transport, raze the cities, eliminate power and telephone lines and, because they won't be needed ever again, shut government departments. Hmmm.

Perhaps all that might be left would be a self-sustaining remnant of the biosecurity police trotting around planting kauri, totara, kowhai, flax and tussock seeds, and warming tui eggs in their hairy armpits.

Finally, as they self-destructed or paddled away in raupo rafts, they would leave these islands to sleep once again awaiting discovery.

There would be only the forest and the birds. Just as it was in the belle epoch before that despicable species Homo Sapiens came and used its intellect, courage, flawed human wisdom and ingenuity to change it all. And then, perhaps, a latter-day Thomas Gray might imagine a land where:

Full many a bird of iridescent sheen
The black-green boughs of hidden
bush doth bear:
Full many a rata born to blush unseen,
Now wastes its scarlet on the man-free air.

Yeah, right.

* Don Donovan is an Albany writer and illustrator.