Dialogue: A time to plant ... and a time to hustle votes

By BRIAN RUDMAN

Just when we'd all got used to the sight of One Treeless Hill, Auckland City is finally getting round to planting a replacement for the pine that expired 10 months ago.

"The objective," says a council report, "is to satisfy the 'sense of need' to plant the summit following the removal of the last remaining pine."

A cynic might also put the timing - programmed for sometime next month - down to the forthcoming council elections. Nothing like a dawn ceremony, flanked by the tangata whenua, to get one's face on the television or in the public print.

My proof for such a foul accusation? Well you have only to leaf through the various reports submitted to the resource consent hearing before planning commissioner Suzanne Sinclair this month to get the old cynic alarms ringing.

There are, for example, several references to the ideal planting time being in autumn - not the springtime now selected. The council's advisers, the Specimen Tree Company, say planting should "ideally be undertaken during the months of April-June. This will allow the plants to establish initial root growth during the autumn-winter months while plant moisture demand is comparatively low".

The experts also advised that the pohutukawa be at least 1m tall and the totara, 1.3m before they are planted out. At the moment the best of the pohutukawa are only half that height and the totara much less. The outcome is to be a staggered planting, starting before the election and stretching over two or three years.

This, of course, presupposes that there are no appeals to the Environment Court. These have to be lodged by next Tuesday. None has so far surfaced.

Hearings do bring out the worst in bureaucrats. Give them an act to comment on, or a subclause to pontificate about, and there's no stopping them. The jargon just flows.

"With the pine gone, there is a perception of an imbalance between the natural and built form of the maunga", or "A biological being such as a tree has its own life span beyond a human generation" or "It is unlikely the vegetative element of the One Tree Hill composition will be visually significant for at least 50 years or more."

But enough of being mean.

As was reported some months ago, transplanting a large specimen tree has been rejected because of the bleak and windswept geography of the site. Instead it has been decided, after great expense, to do what Sir John Logan Campbell did more than a 100 years ago when he planted the late and much-lamented pine.

Sir John planted a totara in memory of the historic totara chopped down by settlers some time before and around it, as a shelter belt, he planted hardy pinus radiata. As we all know, some of the radiata survived; the totara didn't.

This time the experts came up with a similar approach, though for reasons of political correctness immigrant pines were out. Instead, a grove of pohutukawa and totara was seen as the best solution - both grown from seeds or cuttings obtained from within the park. Originally there were to be 19 pohutukawa and 5 totara clustered into the 6m-wide circular planting bed.

This 6m area was all that the Historic Places Trust and council heritage adviser George Farrant would permit. Any larger and adjacent heritage sites could be damaged. The plan was that a thick outside ring of pohutukawa would stand guard as nurse trees to the chosen few inside, to be eliminated when their wind-guard jobs was over.

It was not to be. The heritage police feared these boundary trees might stick roots out beyond the 6m boundary. The revised plan is to have 10 pohutukawa and 5 totara in the middle surrounded by 24 temporary shelter shrubs. Outside them will be a shelter fence and then iron guard railings.

The official jargon is that "by a process of natural and carefully managed selection" one dominant tree will emerge. One suspects that sort of fudging is to try to accommodate Maori objections to official culling of the weak.

The advisers recommend lopping the unwanted at ground level as the self-selected dominants emerge. The tangata whenua view, as represented in the reports, is that if more than one survives, they should all be given their day in the sun.

I sympathise. If anything survives in that bleak spot, surely it has earned the right to life.