John Roughan: Killing time in the city

It came as quite a revelation to me that Queen St had trees. Reading of the campaign to save them my first thought was, what trees? Where? I must have been in the street just about every week for the past 30 years and I'd never noticed them.

Back from holiday I took a walk and it's true. Above the parapets the place is positively leafy. If as I suspect, most of us have never noticed, does it matter that the foliage will fall for the sake of the street's latest makeover?

Normally I'm one of those anguished to see a thriving tree toppled anywhere. I think I saved a gum from a savaging last weekend. It is growing on a neighbour's property and towers beautifully above our front yard.

Sitting there on Saturday morning my wife overheard some ominous conversation next door and noticed through the fence a stocky little man with a chainsaw. By the time I came on the scene, she was having a terse discussion about precisely how much of a tree you can take down without a permit from the council.

The neighbour, who has just moved in, had been told he could remove 20 per cent. His contractor, who had nothing on his van to say he was an arborist, wasn't much interested. He had his ladder against the tree, the powersaw in his hand and was itching to get started.

I'm passive-aggressive in these situations. As the cowboy climbed the ladder I planted myself firmly in his view, folded my arms and watched without a word.

Turning his back, he jacked his appendage into life and attacked the limb of the tree that extended closest to his clients' house. Soon it dropped on their lawn with the thud that seems to shake the planet.

That was enough for the neighbour. Conscious that we were watching he lost interest in the project. But up in the boughs the cowboy was having the testosterone rush. Once you've felt the throbbing penetrative power of the thing you can't just stop.

With my eyes boring into his back he remained perched in the tree half pleading with the neighbour to let him dismember this branch and that. I couldn't hear the replies. It sounded like one of those one-way discussions that dissipate frustration.

Eventually he restarted the machine to slice away a dead twig or two before accepting defeat. Preparing to descend he gave me the benefit of his philosophy.

"This is a park tree not a household tree," he said.

I listened.

"Big trees just cause problems for people."

There was nothing I could say to that.

"Life," he added, "is stressful enough these days without letting trees add to it."

Where, I wondered but didn't ask, did he live? Probably one of those suburbs where any plant that grows to human height is "getting away" and no bush breaks the roofline of the bungalows.

Most of the population lives in places like that. He had probably given me an insight to their psyche. Big trees do seem to make some people uncomfortable. Personally the only stress they cause me is when people come into the neighbourhood and set about clearing their section. The trees are the neighbourhood's main attraction; why did they move in?

Maybe, like me in Queen St, they take the greenery so much for granted they wouldn't notice it unless it was removed.

The Christmas controversy has interested me less for the trees than for what is says about the futility of the consultation procedures used by public bodies.

As Geoff Cumming reported in the paper last weekend, the Auckland City Council had followed the consultation procedures religiously before anyone woke up to what would happen.

A concept plan for an inner city upgrade was published as long ago as April 2004. Press releases were issued, notices printed in the council's newsletter and posted on its website. The council formed a streetscapes reference group, met "stakeholders", held a workshop, set up displays, consulted its urban design panel, sent out brochures with rates and interviewed 179 pedestrians.

Those who noticed the trees were to be replaced urged that the replacements be natives. The council agreed and the plans progressed happily for another year before the Herald highlighted the tree replacement and all hell erupted.

Don't you just feel for the planners? Nor do I.

The consultation methods of public bodies are not like the market research done by business. Commercial services need to make sure people will like what they want to do otherwise they lose money. So market research sets out to discover what people really want. Public bodies set out on consultation with a purpose quite different.

Their procedures are fundamentally intended to leave people content with what the public body wants to do, and probably will do with minor concessions. As the local body scholar Graham Bush told Cumming, objectors make the mistake of supposing hear means heed.

Councils typically present their plans in the most anodyne terms. The plan for the Queen St facelift originally mentioned only "more trees and landscaping". Later it allowed it would be "planting native trees along the street". Had the planners stated their intentions plainly from the start they would have discovered what most people really think of removing healthy trees.

Trees have a value that is more than aesthetic; they are living expressions of time in one place. Whether a tree has grown where it stands for 20 or 200 years it represents the remorseless, glorious chemistry of life. To kill all that time in two minutes should always hurt the human soul.