KEY POINTS:
Beauty, as the saying goes, is in the eye of the beholder. And Lesley Max, children's advocate turned friend of the flowers, who led the fight to save exotic trees earmarked for the chop in the Queen St upgrade, doesn't behold a lot of beauty in the planting plan for Aotea Square.
She is upset that "graceful trees shading seats and colourful planter boxes of flowers" providing "dappled shade and the beauty of flowers to cheer and inspire" will be replaced by colourless "native planting".
That Max quotes approvingly the example of Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan exposes the fundamental flaw in her argument. This is not New York. The first European settlers here may have been seeking to establish a little piece of England in the South Pacific, but we've come a long way since then.
As anyone knows who has spent time in it, the New Zealand bush is a fabulously colourful environment. It doesn't boast the rainbow hues of tropical jungle but the planners of civic spaces are right to tune their planting programmes to the environment in which the plants must flourish.
Pretty pansies may look fine in domestic window boxes but in public spaces, particularly after a jolly good lashing by winter rains, they look sad and battered. How much better to have public spaces planted in a way that speaks of who - and where - we are.
