Editorial: Tree felling stingingly unkind cut

Heretaunga ecological region boasts just 3 per cent of its original native vegetation. Photo / Paul Taylor

"Unscrupulous", indeed.

Fitzroy Ave resident Andrew McNeil yesterday used the adjective to describe a decision to fell a grand cabbage tree, or ti kouka, near his Hastings home.

There's always something unceremonious about levelling a native tree - but this case is an unfeigned howler.

For reference sake, Heretaunga ecological region boasts just 3 per cent of its original native vegetation. Needless to say, that's a percentage in want of serious redressing.

It's what makes this decision from the Hastings District Council's subsidiary, Hastings District Properties Ltd, to drop possibly the largest ti kouka in urban Hastings, simply unfathomable.

Its rationale? To accommodate in-fill spec housing.

A sign of the times perhaps. But it seems not only does the council continue to shoe-horn non-natives into the soil (let's not forget the ubiquitous Chinese windmill palms and melia trees across the city), it's ridding the region of the few indigenous specimens that remain.

Author and botanist Philip Simpson estimates the tree was about 60 years old. Not ancient as an individual, but timeless in this country as a species.

It's negligence at worst, ignorance at best.

Like certain cities in the UK disillusioned with their local authorities' bumbling guardianship of flora, a citizen-based guerilla gardening phenomenon can't be far away.

Perhaps we're too bogged down in the heavyweight bouts of amalgamation, elections, fracking and water storage, to reflect on what constitutes a region's sanctity.

To excise this tree was to excise an urban icon.