GLENMORE STREET

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 24, 28 July 1927, Page 12

GLENMORE STREET

THE PRELIMINARIES

CLEARING THE KNOLL

TEEES TO MAKE TIP

Judging from the work now being done preliminary to the actual widening of Glenuiore street, it will probably be some little time before much impression is made on the job as seen from the roadway, and certainly no actual filling of the gully can be undertaken for some time, as a good deal of heavy work must be completed first. On the knoll high above the gully, at a point roughly opposite the junction of Garden road with Glenmore street, quarter of an acre or so of rough ground is being cleared of trees, for it is from this point that mast of the spoil will be obtained. Very few of the trees on this knoll could be described as handsome, most of them being spindly pines and old macrocarpas, though there are one or two fine trees, none of them natives. Here is A class work for A class men, felling, sawing, splitting and piling the wood in cord lots at points accessible to haulage. By the time the knoll is clear enough to allow excavation to be commenced another gang of men will have been J busy with the construction of heavy ' timber platforms leading to the heads of the chutes by which the spoil will be shot direct to the gully below. Meanwhile also the stream will be culverted with concrete pipes, 2J and 3ft (in the lower part) in diameter. It will not be until these preliminary works are done that the job can be tackled in force. Below Garden road the widening will be of quite a different nature, merely a setting back of the present Gardens fence line (actually it encroaches several feet upon the road reservation) and the re-formation of the present bank inside the Gardens fence to carry the footway as set back. Several lengths of the picket fence have already been taken down to facilitate working, which, up to the present, consists chiefly in removing the valuable rhododendrons for replanting elsewhere in the Gardens or in other city reserves. A HUNDRED ACRES OF TREES. With the objections that have been raised against the destruction of trees in the carrying out of the very necessary widening of Glenmore street many people will agree, or, at any rate, sympathise, for Wellington has far too few trees, but in this case the council and its officers have decided that there is no other way out: that the trees, many of them past their prime of beauty, cannot stand in the way of an improvement that is essential in the public interest. However, even to those who still protest against tree-cutting, necessary or not, there is consolation in the fact that a little down the main road, above Grant road, a hill face many times greater in area than the knoll in the Gardens is being planted with trees, and that at other points about the Town Belt more tens of thousands of trees are being set out. The expenditure of £1000 of relief works money on tree-planting thia winter will mean that roughly 100 acres of city land will look better in the future.