N.Z. trees in Golden Gate Park

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33448, 1 February 1974, Page 15

N.Z. trees in Golden Gate Park

A homesick New Zealander in San Francisco can console himself by standing under a kauri tree or in the shade of a pohutukawa. He can see rimu, rata, titoki and cabbage trees, ponga, nikau and ngaio. He can marvel, as do trampers along the Milford Track, at the size of a New Zealand native fuchsia.

AH these specimens and at least 100 others native to New Zealand are in the city’s great Golden Gate Park, more than 1000 acres of forest, lakes, gardens, meadows and sports facilities which provide a treasure house for those who love the outdoors.

A Scot from Stirlingshire developed the park on barren sand dunes and supervised it tyrannically for 56 years, dying on the job when he was 96 years old, in 1943.

He was John McLaren, whose motto was “Trees anti more trees” and he said before he died that he had planted in the park at least one tree from every nation in the world but one — Bolivia. His landscape

masterpiece runs from the centre of San Francisco for three miles, ending at the ocean beach. McLaren corresponded with colleagues throughout the world, and a stream of seeds, cuttings and plants flowed steadily into his nurseries, A recent horticultural writer noted that New Zealand and Australia have been unusually important sources of such acquisitions. San Francisco enjoys a climate virtually unique in the United States, markedly different from that even just across its boundaries, because of the peculiar topography in relation to the surrounding waters, and its year-round temperatures are sometimes compared with those of Wellington. Although Golden Gate Park is a major recreational facility, with playing fields, planetarium, large public art gallery and Academy of Sciences, McLaren made it virtually an arboretum with its immense botanical variety. But in 1926 Helene Strybing,

a wealthy woman, left funds to establish within the park a 70-acre garden in which more than 5000 species of trees, shrubs and plants have been collected from all over the world. It is the Strybing Arboretum, usually listed among the 10 best such institutions in the United States.

The arboretum provides lectures, tours, flower shows and demonstrations to the public. Its library, also donated by a woman philanthropist, contains numerous volumes on the flora of New Zealand, including two rare books edited by Mr T. F. Cheeseman, an early curator of the Auckland Museum. They comprise “Illustrations of the New Zealand Flora”, produced by the Government printer in Wellington in 1914.

The librarian (Miss Barbara Ingle) and the arboretum director (an Englishman, John Bryan) are knowledgeable on New Zealand plant life and Miss Ingle pointed out that the potted plant

currently decorating the library’s reading room is a Cordyline australia — a New Zealand species of cabbage tree.

Some native New Zealand plants are so familiar to Californians that few local residents think of them as exotic in origin. Among these are New Zealand flax and certain species of pittosporum, a shrub widely popular with California gardeners.

Also adding similarity to the landscapes of both countries are California’s übiquitous eucalypts or gum trees, introduced from Australia in the 19th century, as they were to New Zealand, and pampas grass, the endemic plant from the Argentine which is known to New Zealanders as tootoo.

Of course, Californians visiting New Zealand can find some of their state’s native flora. Undoubtedly some of the 500 species of rhododendron .in Golden Gate Park and more than 200 camellias are California

hybrids which have reached New Zealand. The small but handsome young grove of California redwoods at Hamurana, near Rotorua, originated in California, where the tallest of these trees is 340 ft tall and 3000 years old. And New Zealand’s most cultivated tree — the Pinus radiata of her big commercial forests — is California’s own Monterey pine.

Left: New Zealand flax against a California sky. This big specimen in Strybing Arboretum is one of many in the state.

Middle: Tree fems thrive in the cool, moist environment of the arboretum, 70 acres in the city’s three-mile-long Golden Gate Park.

Right: Pohutukawa, characteristically growing its own props and buttresses, just as it does at Whakatane or the Coromandel, may be found in the Strybing. At the left of these can be seen a young lancewood.