ARBOR DAY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 29, 3 August 1939, Page 17

ARBOR DAY

PLANTING AT MT. COOK

"BEAUTIFY YOUR COUNTRY"

Though this year Arbor Day was not observed by so many planting ceremonies as last year, yet the city and suburbs have since yesterday so many more hundreds of trees, mostly planted by school children.

The main city ceremony was held at the Mount Cook School, where a plot of ground on the Buckle Street frontage, for a long time nobody's particular business, was given a start to permanent beauty. In the Hutt Valley and other suburban schools the youngsters did a good deal of planting, and. in all schools they were told about Arbor Day as a day to be observed in a practical way, by planting today for tomorrow!^ greater enjoyment and happiness..

The speeches "at the Mount Cook School were pleasantly briex. Captain S. S. Holm, president of the Wellington Beautifying Society, was quite to the point. The thought and the action of the day, he said, was to endeavour to see reclothed, as they once were, the hills and unused lands of the country.

The chairman of the school committee, Mr. A. C. Blair, expressed the very hearty appreciation of the committee and parents of the action of the Beautifying Society in holding the ceremony at Mount Cook.

Mr. H. V. Dyer, chairman of the Education Board, Spoke of +he interest which the children and the board had had in Arbor Day since 1933, when the observance was very properly revived. From 1933 to 1935 the Forestry Department had supplied exotic forest trees to the schools but from 1935 the trees were supplied by the City Council, the Hutt Borough Council, and the Beautifying Society. Last year, however, this arrangement was discontinued in view of the raising by each school of New Zealand trees in school nursery plots for planting in the Centennial year.

"This work is well under way," said Mr. Dyer, "and the Wellington Education Board has more than its full quota —50,000 trees and shrubs, all native to New Zealand—under cultivation for the Centennial planting." (Applause.) In addition to free trees supplied during the 1933-38 period a number of schools purchased trees themselves said Mr. Dyer.

"The whole matter of tree planting and New Zealand trees in particular, i_ being kept well before all schools," he continued, "and circulars containing suggestions for the guidance of teachers have and are being issued. We are definitely striving to inculcate in the young a tree-mindedness, not only to plant, but to protect and love the trees and know their peculiarities and habits and to be ever anxious to preserve them from fire and destruction."

The British Commissioner, Sir Harry Batterbee, said that it was a pity that people had to live in towns, for towns and cities meant that natural beauties were inevitably destroyed, yet much could be done to improve their surroundings. He would suggest that every child should become really interested in trees and birds and butterflies, all. the objects of Nature, for therein they could find a great joy of life. A hundred years ago Wellington and its surrounding hills must have been one of the most beautiful spots in New Zealand. Almost all the natural growth had disappeared, but -Arbor Day was to interest .the children and. their parents in recovering for themselves and their children's children the tree beauties -that used to be.

The Mayor, Mr. T. C. A- Hislop, spoke to a short and pointed text: On no account allow to be destroyed a growing tree except of necessity, and plant more trees in bare; places, for the greater beauty of city and country.

And the speeches being over, the youngsters . watched the official trees well and properly planted—by the Mayor, Sir Harry Batterbee, Captain Holm, Mrs. Knox Gilmer, Mrs. P. Fraser, and others—under the expert eye of the Director of Parks and Resei'ves (Mr. J. G. MacKenzie) and then fell to themselves. And the plot will be the-better for it in coming yeass.