Story of a stately pine
By Mitch Graham
Tupare is renowned for its stately trees. We often see visitors standing in awe of our Californian redwoods, dawn redwoods, liquidambers, tulip trees and others.
One tree of mammoth proportions is often taken for granted by locals but much admired by international visitors - the Norfolk Island pine.
Quick-growing with eye-catching symmetry, it has been used as a focal point in large home gardens or favoured by city architects when choosing a species for esplanade plantings, for example on the art deco Napier foreshore.
Recently I caught a ferry to Waiheke Island, and, surveying the Auckland landscape from the top deck, I could see that the dormant volcanic cones dominated the ridges. But so did the mature Norfolk Island pines that would have been planted early last century, if not earlier, by gardeners attempting to create something exotic in their expanding city.
Being evergreen, they are a tidy tree with no autumn leaf drop, just the occasional shedding of cord-like branchlets. These are possibly a nuisance on the golf course but a useful piece of armoury for children's play fights with their siblings.
Norfolk Island pines are conifers and belong to the genus Araucaria, native to the southern hemisphere. All 19 species are large and unique. They appear unchanged from when there were forests of them in the days of the dinosaurs.
The monkey puzzle tree, A. araucana (which would be at home in a Dr Seuss book) shares its South American home with giant birds, the condors.
Bunya bunya, A. bidwillii, is from the cooler hills of southern Queensland, with cones similar to the pine cones we know, but much larger. The Aborigines are skilled at harvesting and roasting this delicacy, though the European explorers often failed, resulting in severe bouts of tummy pain.
Ile des Pins in New Caledonia is a place of stunning beauty, and brochures advertising the resort usually capture images of the turquoise waters framed by slender trees clinging to the coastal cliffs. The tree is A. columnaris and is unique to that location.
Of all the Araucaria species, the Norfolk Island pine, A. heterophylla is the most commonly seen in New Zealand, perhaps because it is the most eye-catching.
Sir Russell Matthews must have thought so to have planted two of these trees in such prominent positions at Tupare and I certainly wouldn't question his taste.
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Mitch Graham (left) is Garden Manager - Tupare for the Taranaki Regional Council This column was published in the Taranaki Daily News on 16 April 2010 |
