For most of our history since 1840, the only good native tree was a dead one.
With the aid of the axe, the crosscut saw and the safety match, we hacked and burned down great forests to make way for the British Empire's new farm.
As recently as the 1970s kauri trees were still being felled in the Coromandel Ranges. In a few short years, attitudes have changed.
These days you do not dare look sideways at a titoki or a pohutukawa or any of the other children of Tane for fear of breaking some bylaw or regulation or other.
Most of us urbanites would not quarrel too much with this change of heart, either. But sometimes this native tree cult throws up some zany high priests.
Like the neighbour of Glenfield's Embassy Reserve who wants the two dozen large oaks in this public park chopped down in favour of natives.
He is backed by something called KERP, the Kaipatiki Ecological Restoration Project, which endorses the removal of all exotics, even mature ones, to make way for natives.
Then there is the North Shore City Council practice of ring-barking and poisoning pine trees, old and young, in Kauri Point Centennial Park, Birkenhead, in order to give native seedlings a better chance.
This policy was abruptly put on hold recently after city councillor Gary Holmes denounced it as "tree apartheid."
He contrasted this treatment with the coddling given the One Tree Hill pine across town.
To be fair, the council was only following the advice of Auckland University botanists who had recommended ring-barking and digging out seedling and sapling pines.
All of this in response to a park management plan that called for all but the most significant exotic trees to be replaced with natives in order to enhance the native bush component of the reserve.
In the case of the Birkenhead park there are at least remnants of the original vegetation on which to build.
In the case of Puketutu Island in the Manukau Harbour off Mangere there is no such template.
The native forest has long gone, cleared for mining, farming and, in more recent times, the exotically planted park of the late brewery mogul Sir Henry Kelliher.
Undeterred by this lack of original vegetation, city officials seem keen to try to recreate the past.
They are even talking of analysing historic pollen samples from the soil to find out what once grew on the island.
Puketutu has become an issue because the proposed construction of travellers accommodation on the island will result, if it goes ahead, in the destruction of 50 of 200 trees in the park surrounding the existing Kelliher House.
Noting that over half the condemned trees are gums, council planner Richard Gardner told a planning hearing that "the replacement of these trees with native specimens grown on the island will ultimately have a more beneficial effect and will enhance the environment."
Mr Gardner came up with the intriguing proposal that every removed exotic tree be replaced with one native, but that every removed native be replaced by two natives.
Planning commissioners incorporated the proposal into their resource consent approval.
For Tony Brunt, chairman of "Friends of Puketutu," this is all "botanic chauvinism" of a most unsavoury kind.
"Obviously we need to give natives fair emphasis in parks planting but I do not think we should get precious about it."
He has a point. Where would Auckland be without its trademark phoenix palms and Norfolk pines and, on the outskirts, the macrocarpas?
What would Cornwall Park be without the avenues of oaks and the grove of olives, to say nothing of the Moreton Bay figs, the redwood, the Monterey cypress, the totara and pohutukawa?
Jack Hobbs, curator/manager of the Regional Botanic Gardens, sums it up nicely.
"I am a lover of native plants but I could not possibly deny myself the pleasure of enjoying all these other wonderful plants from around the world."
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