ELM TREES FOR FIFTH AVENUE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23381, 24 June 1939, Page 9 (Supplement)

ELM TREES FOR FIFTH AVENUE

English elms have made their appearance in the famous Fifth Avenue of New York, a street of skyscrapers and very modern buildings built on the solid rock of Manhattan Island. It has been a dream of Mr. Rockefeller to plant a row of English elms along the frontage of the amazing group of buildings known" as Roclce-

feller Centre, the tallest of which is 65 storeys high and is packed as full of busy business offices as a hive is of bees. Each of these forty-year-old elm trees, which have been brought into the city from a country estate whero they have been gaity growing for the

past twenty years, has beert set in a hole 12 feet square and four feet deep. There being no nourishment in Manhattan rock, a number of pipes have been introduced into the soil with which the holes are filled so that chemical food can be administered to the roots three times a year. It is the dream of New Yorkers to make their city, one of real avenues. At present the word Avenue means only a perfectly . straight street riWing. from the south to the north of Manhattan Island. Previous experiments have shown, however, that trees given a tiny bit of soil in a hole cut out of a rock will grow happily with the artificial food that is fed to' them. So these avenues of stone, iron and cement are very gradually becoming beautified by the presence of green, and surely enough just as fast as the trees are planted the birds come from seemingly nowhere to inhabit them.