Notable trees plentiful in central Canty

Press, 24 September 1988, Page 26

Notable trees plentiful in central Canty

More about trees this week — including a competitor for the Riccarton House pear that I described (on September 10) as the oldest tree in Canterbury. Mrs Felicity Aitken, of Pigeon Bay, writes that her family’s property, “Craigforth,” has in its garden some very old fruit trees, dating from the time of Captain Sinclair, who settled there with his family about 1843. “Although the original homestead was destroyed by fire in the 1880 s,” Mrs Aitken writes, “remnants of the old garden remained until the Wahine storm (1968) when many treasures were lost, sadly.

“There was a beautiful sweet orange bush, and many fine oaks and walnuts, and pear trees. “There are still some very old pear trees. Two of them are in front of our present homestead, and they brighten our lives in October, when they are a wonderful sight. “Unfortunately, the fruit, which is prolific, is not edible. Try as I might I cannot make them soft enough. They are lovely-looking fruit, and our cows love them!

“There is also a huge black cherry, several very big sequoias, and a nice specimen of a bunya pine from Queensland. ’ "There must also have been a very big stand of native trees, but as this was also the site of .the mill of G. S. Holmes, who milled the timber for the Lyttelton rail tunnel, for which he was the engineer, we have

Country Diary Derrick Rooney

very old kahikatea left. They still look quite healthy.” As for the big blue gum in Yaldhurst Road (pictured with the article), this tree must be at least 100 years old, according to the son of a man who set up a horse-training establishment on the site about the turn of the century. Mr E. G. McGrath, of Mt Pleasant, who is 82, remembers the big tree from his childhood days on the property, then a' 10acre block owned by his father, Paddy McGrath. “It was already a big tree 80 years ago, so it must be at least 100 years old,” he said.

A short distance along Yaldhurst Road there used to

second big blue gum, but this was felled many years ago, according to Mr McGrath. “I shouldn’t think there are many people alive who would remember the second tree,” he said. In those days, said Mr McGrath, the area near Riccarton Racecourse was all open country. “I would say that 90 per cent of the houses in the area have been built in the last 40 years,” he said. If anyone has more information about this tree, Mr McGrath would like to know about it. Some other historic eucalyptus trees have come to light since the article was printed, including a massive blue gum on the Rakaia River terraces at Te Pirita, thought to have been planted before 1857, and a huge eucalyptus, probably E. obliqua, at The Point station, Windwhistle, possibly dating from the early 1860 s. Of these, more when I have had a chance to look at them. Meantime, here are some notes about a few other notable trees in the central Canterbury region (the Botanic Gardens and Banks Peninsula are excluded). First, some rarities — in the university grounds, in Millbrook Reserve, and in Burnside Park.

Some trees have disappeared from the old Ham homestead plantings since the university took over the property, through natural causes or to make way for development, but some good things have surved there. One is the Nikko maple (Acer nikoense) in the main rhododendron garden, near the stream. This is a very rare tree in New Zealand, and the Ham specimen is very large for the species, and well shaped. Another rare maple is in Bumside Park, among a group of big old trees which have survived from the original homestead plantings. This is the Montpelier maple (Acer monspessulanus), a Mediterranean species which usually grows into a small, shrubby tree. The Bumside specimen is quite tall, drawn up by its bigger neighbours, and is slightly lopsided. However, it has good genes, because staff of the Waimairi District Council have raised seedlings from it for planting in other reserves, and these have grown into shapely young trees.

An uncommon tree in Millbrook Reserve is the Persian ironwood (Parrotia persica just inside the Carlton Mill Road entrance. This western Asian illative of the witch-hazels has

distinctive blotched bark and curving trunks which give it a very rugged outline. The Riccarton House grounds, where the old pear tree grows, contain excellent specimens of several trees which are uncommon in the district. One is the west Himalayan fir (Abies pindrow) which is the very tall, narrow conifer behind the house. It is labelled. This is the largest known specimen in New Zealand of this tree, which is uncommon in cultivation but is the dominant conifer in the forests of the western Himalaya. Another is the rare weeping lime, and a third is the Nootka cypress (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis) in the group of trees near the homestead.

Nootka cypress is one of the original parents of the Leyland cypresses, which are becoming very popular for shelter and timber planting. It apparently does not take kindly to cultivation, and domesticated trees rarely attain the dimensions reported from the wild. The Riccarton specimen looks small among the bigger trees around it, but is one of the biggest Nootka cypresses known in New Zealand (I know of only one better in Canterbury — in the Geraldine Domain).

Despite redevelopment, the central city retains a few notable trees. The biggest of the plane trees in Cathedral Square is one of the biggest recorded specimens in New Zealand. There are also large plane trees near the old Supreme Court site, on the Avon Riverbank, and at Mona Vale.

A tamarisk tree in the Youth Hostel Association grounds at the junction of Worcester Street and Rolleston Avenue has had its main limbs lopped back at some time, but 18 years ago it was recorded as the biggest New Zealand specimen of this Mediterranean dryland tree. A block or two away, on the Montreal Street frontage of the old Christchurch Girls’ High School, is one of the city’s historic trees — the Tasmanian blackwood planted about 1860 by Dr Silas Stedman, the first superintendent of Christchurch Hospital. Dr Stedman lived on this site. He died in 1865, aged 44. Possibly not the biggest, but certainly one of the finest cedars is in Mona Vale, on the ridge above the old millpond and the iris species garden. Mona Vale also boasts the city’s biggest sycamore (Canterbury’s biggest, too, I should think) and a large tulip tree, pit* one of the best

garden specimens of the New Zealand cedar. The latter’s Northern Hemisphere relative, the incense cedar (Calocedrus decurrens), is fairly rare in New Zealand, but quite a good specimen may be seen overhanging Clyde Road, a short distance west of the Waimairi council’s offices in Jeffreys Road. There are many ginkgo trees in parks and gardens in Christchurch; one of the best is in Rhodes Street, in a private garden where the owners, about 1960, changed their house design from a single-storey to a twostorey building to accommodate the tree. Too bad that the developers of the recently planted orchard on the old McKenzie estate in Yaldhurst Road did not follow this lead — the magnificent eucalyptus tree which has been a landmark (near the pylons) for many, many years, was recently felled, and its stump has been bulldozed out. Also in Yaldhurst Road, at Church Corner, is one of the city’s historic commemorative trees, the Edward VII oak, planted in 1902 by local schoolchildren. Beyond the city limits, some of the finest old trees grow on the old properties inland near the

foothills. Mostly these are not visible from roads, but as you pass the old brick Homebush Woolshed on State Highway 72 you will see, on the slope behind the woolshed, the tops of two very tall conifers projecting from a mixed woodland. One is a very large Ponderosa pine and the other is a macrocarpa regarded as the tallest and, from a forester’s viewpoint, best of its kind. It was clear pruned to a height of about 16 metres by a group of forestry trainees in the 1920 s and has a massive trunk, free from fluting and heavy buttressing. Also at Homebush, but not visible from the road, is possibly the oldest necklace poplar (Populus deltoides) “Virginiana” in New Zealand. A massive tree with a trunk diameter well exceeding two metres, it was planted about 1852. Cuttings of it have been distributed to many parts of New Zealand over the years and one or two have grown even larger than the parent — though not in Canterbury. Appreciation of trees is highly subjective and these notes merely record, sketchily, a few that have impressed me over the years. It is by no means a comprehensive survey of the trees of central Canterbury. I haven’t mentioned, for example, the fine golden macrocarpa in a farmyard about two kilometres west of the’Yaldhurst Hotel. No doubt there are many others, notable for their size, age, or rarity. I’d be pleased to hear about them.,>„ (>