TREES AND BIRDS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 189, 12 August 1933, Page 8

TREES AND BIRDS.

While Auckland has been busy destroying the natural loveliness of its waterfront, Wellington has adopted the reverse policy. The severe lines of its broken rim of hills are being softened with plantations of trees, and so generously is the planting extended year by year that the capital city will soon be a place of beauty in which man's effort has considerably improved the landscape that the early pioneers stripped of timber. The endeavours which the civic tree planters are making to restore a garment of foliage and flower to the Town Belt of a thousand acres —this includes the skyline hills and. extends in some places to the harbourside —were detailed in a report to the Wellington City Council lately. Twenty years ago the Town Belt was given over to gracing cattle, and broom and gorse were its most prominent features. Now the gibe that Wellington was a treeless city no longer holds truth. So much planting of native trees has been done that the whole city will before very long have the aspect of a town set in a great natural park. The pleasantest feature of it all, to an Aucklander's eyes especially, is the extent to which the pohutukawa has been planted. This tree of ours did not originally grow as.far south as the Wellington district. Now it has been acclimatised most successfully, and it blooms just as generously in midsummer as it does on the Auckland coast. During the last ten years fifty thousand pohutukawa have been planted on these hills and slopes around Wellington Harbour, as well as many thousands of other indigenous trees, which are doing well. This year the director of reserves proposes to plant another forty thousand trees. Exotic pines are planted to some extent as shelter, but it is intended that these shall be eliminated as the slower-growing trees come forward. Kauri trees, too, have been planted, and avenues of kowhai.

Native vegetation and native birds are interdependent, to a large extent, and the planting of sucli nectar food trees as pohutukawa and kou-liai and the 'various berry-bearing trees is likely to encourage the birds to return to tlie neighbourhood of the towns. Indeed, there are indications that the tui and the bellbird are retraining something of their ancient confidence in" manand are appreciating the efforts made by bird lovers to bring them to their parks and gardens. From Dunedin. Wunganui and Masterton there are report? of both these birds frequenting the town gardens in increasing numbers. Winter contribv f: s of sugar and honey water in tins set in wie the gardens often bring a [reward in bellbird and tui song. —J.C.