Reserve claims ‘incorrect’

Press, 21 July 1988, Page 7

Reserve claims ‘incorrect’

By

GLENIS CARROLL

Assertions that the Mount Cavendish reserve lacks botanical values were misinformed, said the Canterbury Botanical Society yesterday.

Dr David Norton, the society’s spokesman on conservation, said the special botanical features of the reserve were well known.

Society members had been studying the botany of the Port Hills for many years and Mount Cavendish received the highest scientific ranking of all the Port Hills scenic reserves during a botanical survey in 1971, Dr Norton said.

“The suggestion by a local farmer, Peter Scott, that one-third of the reserve is rock is incorrect. The botanically important rock bluffs amount to only some 10 per cent of the reserve,” he said. Dr Norton, who is a botanist at the University of Canterbury, said the rest of the reserve was silver tussock grassland with occasional fescue tussock, a species uncommon on the Port Hills. “The proposal to build the gondola top

station in what is one of the best areas of silver tussock grassland on the Port Hills is of particular concern to our society,” Dr Norton said.

The density of silver tussock at Mount Cavendish was the highest anywhere along the northern portion of the Port Hills, and the associated native flora included several rare plants such as the large Spaniard and a species of cotula confined to the Port Hills and Banks Peninsula, he said.

The suggestion that the area of silver tussock grassland should be swapped for 18ha of degraded grassland was ecologically absurd. “It is like swapping your best china for paper plates,” Dr Norton said.

The society was not opposed to development or to the gondola top station being built at an alternative site but it did not want to see significant botanical features of the reserve prejudiced by such a development, he said. Mt Cavendish rarities, page 12