Draft Town Belt Management Plan - Wellington City Council

The plantation years
Public agitation for planting continued. The Scenery Preservation Society was formed in the mid-
1890s and undertook a number of self-funded reserve planting projects, including Town Belt sites,
over the following decade. In 1906, an editorial in the New Zealand Mail 108 deplored the Council’s
expenditure on bedding plants in preference to trees and, in 1910, the Evening Post suggested
fundraising “to buy some decent covering for the Cinderella of the Town Belt” 109 .
Mass planting resumed
again in the early 1900s
and continued into the
1930s. Relief labour
employed under central
government and
Council unemployment
relief schemes greatly
assisted the completion
of the major plantations
by 1940.
During this period,
Council reorganisation
in 1913 saw the setting
up of a Forestry
Department. It was
soon absorbed into the
new Parks and Reserves
Department, set up in
1918 to, among other
things, apply a more
comprehensive style of
management to the
Council’s reserves, with
better integration of
recreational and scenic objectives.
216
Figure 10: View from the new tramway on Brooklyn Road, 1907.
Tree planting in Central Park (left) began this year. In the distance,
the early Pirie/Ellice streets plantations can be seen on the
otherwise mainly bare Mt Victoria ridge.
(Wellington City Council Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, G 025451 1/1)
Much of the planting still relied on the fast-growing conifers that the Botanic Garden had found
tolerant of Wellington’s clay soils and strong winds – in particular, radiata pine and macrocarpa.
However, from the 1910s, mixed plantings with a wider selection of other conifers, eucalyptus trees,
wattles and deciduous trees were also used. Native species, too, were planted extensively in the
1920s and 1930s, including pohutukawa, griselinia, karo, ngaio and lacebarks. Long before the
1970s, when the regenerative capacity of native vegetation became well known, the first Director of
Parks and Reserves, J. G. McKenzie, saw the conifers as a means of suppressing gorse and
providing shelter for native forest to regenerate 110 . He was subsequently proved right, although the
conifers proved a far longer-living nursery cover then he anticipated.
During the 1920s and 1930s there were calls for the plantations to be methodically planned for
potential commercial harvest 111 . Although the Parks Department did plan planting configurations
these were designed to withstand wind and provide shelter for young planting rather than quality
timber. In reality, plantings were often haphazard, according to what land became available as
grazing leases ended. Little, if any, silvicultural work was carried out.
108 “Our Treelessness,” The New Zealand Mail, August 15, 1906, 69.
109 Evening Post, 14 March 1910, 6.
110 Cook, “Background Report,” 20.
111 Follows, 26.
Draft Town Belt Management Plan October 2012