TREES ON HILLSIDES

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 288, 1 September 1931, Page 9

TREES ON HILLSIDES

Municipal Afforestation EXTENSIVE PLANTING Bare hillsides and clay cuttings have long given Wellington city a reputation for drabness in appearance. The aspect of the hills which surround the city is pleasant enough so long as the grass is green, but as the soil on these hills is poor the grass fails early in the summer, and if there is any heat at all the hillsides become brown and parched. This is frequently the case in January, and from then on to April the hills and dales of the Belt are a dead brown, relieved only here and there by patches of black marking the area of grass fires. Thanks to the opportunity afforded under the No. 5 unemployment relief scheme a great deal of tree-planting has been done by the Corporation during the last six weeks. On the western slopes of the Mount Victoria range some thousands of pobutukawas, ngaios, kowhais, and bluegums have been planted, or are being planted. They extend the full breadth of the Town Belt, and should only 50 per cent, of them strike and grow to maturity the hillsides will in some fifteen or twenty years present almost an entirely different appearance to that of today.

Asked why trees such as the oak, the ash, the chestnut,,and beech —all English trees—should not be planted, the Director of Reserves stated yesterday that they would never stand up to the lashing of the wind on the face of Mount Victoria, which was fully exposed to the prevailing northwesterlies.

Gradually the barren cuttings round about the city are being attended to. The bank between the fire brigade station in Constable Street and the top of Wellington Road has been planted with climbing roses, and in another year should become a thing of beauty in blossom time instead of an eyesore. Opposite that bank, where a gully has been filled in. the ground has been levelled and planted with shrubs, and now presents an aspect pleasing to the eve. where was formerly a rubbish tip-