KEY POINTS:
First, the positives. The nikaus look very handsome. They are complemented by some attractive wooden and stone seating.
The new, juvenile liquidambars are bravely growing in their deep, irrigated holes. In time they will provide summer shade, autumn colour and winter sun, enhancing beautiful buildings and screening ugly ones. They have a long way to go. But they're there.
The voices of the citizens were, belatedly, heard and the planners' vision of desolate stretches of concrete relieved here and there by a few cabbage trees was seen for the nightmare it was.
It cost plenty to mount an 11th hour legal challenge against a council that had planned its chainsaw massacre to be slipped through an improperly constituted hearing. But the planners' vision of an urban Footrot Flats endures. Queen St median strip planting is simply dire: stunted, scruffy grasses in a thick prison of concrete.
There used to be cannas. But cannas are flowers and colourful - thus abhorrent to the zealot planners.
Citizens' feedback persuaded them to relent in their "improvement" of St Patrick's Square, where eliminating spring bulbs and flowering shrubs would purportedly contribute to the creation of "an urban oasis where people can relax and enjoy their surroundings". Citizens need to keep up the pressure.
A gardener at Aotea Square whom I congratulated on the flower beds there said there would be no flowers in the "upgraded Aotea Square"!
Places as disparate as Manhattan, York, Haifa and Otorohanga delight their ratepayers and visitors with lush street plantings of flowers. If Auckland were to take a similar approach, we might meet the planners' goals of "one of the world's most vibrant and dynamic" CBDs, "a place that feels like the heart and expresses the soul of Auckland". That soul is not drab brown and green and concrete.
* Lesley Max is a children's advocate, who led the fight to save trees in Queen St.
