Start made on tree garden to rival world’s best — all on a shoestring budget

Press, 19 August 1981, Page 23

Start made on tree garden to rival world’s best — all on a shoestring budget

By

DERRICK ROONEY

A collection of trees — fit to rival the best in the world on the favoured lower slopes of Mount Herbert - overlooking Charteris Bay at the head of Lyttelton Harbour: that is the dream of a group of. Canterbury tree enthusiasts concerned with the establishment of Canterbury’s and perhaps New Zealand’s first tree arboretum at Orton Bradley Park. - The group is the Canterbury Arboretum Association, and its president (Mr Hamish Deans, of Darfield) summarises its ambition as the compilation of a’national "reference collection" of the temperate world’s important ornamental and economic trees.

Earlier this year members of the association took a significant symbolic step towards this goal when they planted in the park about 90 young specimens of New Zealand’s own premier timber tree and forest giant, the kauri.

Bradley Park is a 653 ha area which features a unique blend of recreation and productivity. Bequeathed to the nation by Mr Bradley, it has its own empowering act of Parliament, and managed by an independent board under the chairmanship of the district Commissioner of Crown Lands. The Arboretum Association, which was formed by a small group of Canterbury tree enthusiasts when they first heard that Mr Bradley had left his estate to the nation, has a representative on the board, and its aim is to give the board what help it can in the planning, planting, and maintenance of the park trees. Some 100 of the park’s 653 hectares have been set aside for forestry purposes, including an aboretum.

The park rises from the seashore at Charteris Bay to Bradley Peak and the middle slopes of Mount Herbert. Most of it is pastoral, but there are extensive belts of exotic trees in the gullies and the valley bottom, and about 26ha of production forest, planted since 1953. As well, there are remnants of kanuka scrub and mixed con-ifer-hardwood forest which, with the help of the Royal Forest and Bird Society, have recently been fenced off from further grazing. The understorey flora of these areas has been severely modified by more than a century of browsing

by livestock, but already is beginning to recover. The park embraces a probably uniquely wide variety of land uses — golf, tennis, pony riding, tramping, and picnicking as well as pastoral farming and forestry. Forestry is provided for in the management plan, but the board’s policy is to limit it to an area that does not jeopardise either the farming activities or the hydrological balance of the property. As well, both the pattern of tree planting and the choice of species are required to “respect the landscape character of the park and Banks Peninsula,” but Mr Deans, who is a member of the park’s board, says this does not mean that the emphasis has to be on native trees.

Apart from the block of

kauris planted in the autumn, the arboretum plantings so far have been blocks of dawn redwoods (metasequoia), redwoods (sequoia) and wellingtonias (sequoiadendron). Another planting made recently features an assortment of exotic podocarps, and the Forest Research Institute has established trial plots of native and South American beeches.

But though the arboretum may in time have some superficial resemblahce to the FRl’s trial grounds at Craigieburn, it will not be developed as a scientific arboretum running conventional trials and comparative testing of different tree species and provenances.

The site is not suitable for such a venture, and in any case the arboretum must be compatible with both the recreational and agricultural activities in the park. One direction in which the lOOha set aside for forestry and arboretum planting might be developed is the creation of a “reference collection” of tree species, from which nurserymen and enthusiasts could be supplied with propagating material. The plantings already made are a first step towards this, but future developments are uncertain.

The park board employs a group of forestry workers at the park under the Government’s subsidised work scheme, but the Arboretum Association has virtually no income of its own. The park itself is entirely dependent on its farming income. This means that any arboretum development must be done on a shoestring, and by voluntary labour, and the development of the lOOha allocated to tree planting will necessarily be slow.

A member of the association, Mr Dick Beauchamp, sees a sharp contrast between this and the funding of arboreta he saw during a study trip to Britain and the United States — a trip during which he visited such famous tree parks as Westonbirt, in Gloucestershire, and. the Hayes Arboretum, in Richmond, Indiana. “None of these famed national tree parks, nor, for that matter, some 50 others whose descriptive brochures we collected could compare in size, beauty, or natural’ suitability with our 653 ha on Banks Peninsula,” says Mr Beauchamp.

“The only trouble is that they have at least 100 years of development and millions of pounds, or dollars, behind them, while we are starting from scratch with only the income of a Canterbury farm.” A nucleus of an international tree collection already exists at Bradley Park, in. the form of numer-.. ous species of eucalypts and an orchard of very old fruit trees, planted by Orton Bradley and his predecessors. None of the trees in the

park is of outstanding rarity, but the eucalypts comprise a good representative selection of the genus, and some are of interest because they are growing well below what is generally regarded as their southerly limit. There are also good specimens of some common economic trees, including an outstanding radiata pine. What the Arboretum Association would like to see now is the planned development of a tree collection that could include not only com-

mon and uncommon timber and ornamental trees but nut-bearing trees, and various poplars, willows, and other species which are under study as possible fodder and bee-forage crops. The beech trees, the wellingtonias and redwoods, the podocarps, and especially the kauris are an appropriate starting point. The kauris were planted late in the autumn, a week after the official opening of the park, and have wintered well, in spite of their having come from the subtropical climate of Northland. The setting — on a sweeping ridge near the edge of the

sea — has the capacity to become a grand sight when the kauris mature at some unspecified future date. At present it is covered by scrubby second-growth kanuka, but as the trees grow they will gradually suppress the kanuka. In the meantime it is performing a useful service as shelter for the young kauris, which are very shade-demanding. Only about 90 kauris —

two-thirds of the consignment sent by the Forest Service — have been planted; the rest were judged too small to go out, and are being grown on for a year in an association member’s “nursery.” Later, other trees will be planted on the ridge as companions for them, but the planting will be carefully planned and landscaped so that it does not obscure the vista of tussocky hillsides sweeping up to the summit of Mount Herbert and Bradley Peak. Eventually, they may well become one of the most handsome groups of trees in Canterbury. They will have high educational value, too, because of their proximity to the giant Californian and Chilean trees; within a small area they will provide visF tors an opportunity to see a grouping of the Pacific region’s forest giants growing in a setting that approximates very closely their natural habitats.

And they will be more — they will be the tangible symbols of something which, says Mr Beauchamp, the members of the Arboretum Association, as tree lovers, stand for; the contrast between the quality of “the most glorious of our native trees” and the vulgarity of the radiata pine. “Nature gave the kauri a

liking for certain soils and climatic conditions. and through uncounted years evolved the noble kauri for.ests of Northland," says Mr Beauchamp. “In. his first 100 years of settlement, European man just about wiped out 10,000 years of nature’s work. “What can we do about it?

“We know that in parks and private gardens from North Cape to Bluff kauri trees are growing. Some water, judicious cultivation and fertilising, and lots of loving care will enable them to grow almost anywhere. “Orton Bradley was a great sportsman, and sport and recreation are going to play their part in his park. He was also a great and practical tree lover. The Canterbury Arboretum Association wants to carry on that side of his work.

“We are not asking for Government money, but we are looking for more members — to satisfy our financial needs — and, much more important, we are looking for men and women who will be able to give voluntary work in the planting and maintenance of the trees we want to see at Orton Bradley Park.

“We hope to bring here to Christchurch, to Canterbury and New Zealand, as many as possible of the glorious varieties of trees — both native and exotic: the providers of timber and shelter, the bearers of food and of flowers, the bringers of bees and birds. . “That is what an arboretum is all about, and if we can get it, it will be something our children’s children will rise up and thank us for."