KEY POINTS:
God save us from the pansy and petunia brigade. If people want to live in a place where the main city square reminds them of their cottage garden at home, then shift to smalltown Otorohanga or Wanganui.
I'm no fan of the latest plans for the redevelopment of Aotea Square, but complicating them by throwing in a battle between pretty flowers and spiky native grasses, and camellias versus karaka trees, risks trivialising the big debate.
As I walked across the square yesterday, the existing flowerbeds hardly looked a thing of beauty. The all-white "busy lizzies" were getting leggy and the faded old pansies were as drab as the rest of us after a month of incessant rain.
On the other hand, across in Queen St, the much-criticised nikau palms were blossoming - literally. It is said that trees under terminal stress attempt to flower in a desperate attempt to pass on their genes.
But I prefer to think the bursts of flower buds, high up their trunks, are the recent down-country migrants' celebration of their new environment. And as if to prove we Aucklanders aren't as bad as we sometimes paint ourselves, not one of these eye-catching flower clusters appears to have fallen victim to a passing hoon.
What is bleedingly obvious is that these impressive trees, whether in Aotea Square or Queen St, do not need fussy annuals at their feet to cheer us up. They do that all by themselves.
As I've admitted before, I was wrong in predicting the nikau would look as out of place in the CBD as the sad chequerboard of potted kauri opposite Britomart.
I'm glad some of the existing exotics were retained down Queen St following the public outcry, but you'd have to be a complete churl to deny the nikau were not a great idea.
As for the cutesy annuals now being called for, they were not the answer to the CBD's woes 50 years ago when Mayor John Luxford rushed about hanging window boxes of pansies everywhere, and they're not now.
Mr Luxford had reached for his frilly gardening gloves in response to the Institute of Architects' charge that Queen St was "one of the worst-looking main streets in the world". The mayor's reaction was to declare "the centre of the city is bereft of horticulture", which to him meant potted plants.
Half a century on, exotic flower campaigner Lesley Max has a down on "drab spiky grasses". I guess it's all in the eye of the beholder. Native grasses come in a multitude of hues, from almost black to green to rust to grey.
The "dull" ones she wants removed from the Queen St median strip have, if you look, starry white flowers bursting forth at the moment. Later will come the berries.
Depending on your grasses, these come in a range of colours too. They're not as blowsy and in-your-face as the shouty imported annuals, I agree. But what's wrong with a bit of sophisticated subtlety, especially when it's home-grown?
But this is all sideshow stuff. The big issue is whether the proposed new design is going to work as the Greek theatre-type assembly place the bureaucrats and their consultants have their hearts set on.
I can't see the need or demand, in this day and age, for such a huge open-air meeting space. Not on this valuable piece of inner-city real estate anyway.
But even if we do need one, Unitec associate professor Dushko Bogunovich suggests the present design doesn't work anyway.
Part of the winning consortium, eight years ago, in the Aotea Square design contest, but not involved in later designs, he suggests the terracing in the proposed amphitheatre design does not provide the rise required for adequate viewing, and that even if it did, it's facing the wrong way.
These are rather more basic concerns than whether frilly hollyhocks and snap-dragons should have equal rights with a variegated flax or a wispy carex in whatever flowerbeds might survive the rebuild.
