Steve Braunias: Auckland’s trees offer silent sanctuary from High Court

The trees fronting University of Auckland's clock tower in a leafy part of the city include a single juvenile lancewood, writes Steve Braunias. Photo / Dean Purcell

OPINION

Lancewood, or horoeka, is my favourite tree in the gardens of Auckland University, which are my favourite public gardens in Auckland, in my favourite part of town – it’s a few hectares of Englishness, with the Victorian mania for orderliness and shadow, for ornament and rest. There’s a single juvenile lancewood outside the university clock tower. The trunk is thin and branchless, the leaves are like fingers or fangs, pointing towards the ground. Such a curious exhibit, more like a drawing of a tree than a tree, something imagined. I stop and look at it every day this past fortnight on my way to report on a trial at the High Court of Auckland of a man accused of murdering a baby.

Queensland umbrella tree, also known, kind of bafflingly, as octopus tree. I stop and stare at this specimen every day, too. It lurks in the undergrowth at the edge of the university campus towards Parliament St, and looks so lovely and tropical and laughable – leaves like umbrellas! – that I was harbouring ambitions of planting my very own umbrella tree until I discovered that bores and killjoys at Auckland Council have prohibited it. It’s invasive. It’s a pest. But it’s so obviously awesome, and it works: I stood under it on one day when it rained, and remained perfectly dry. Then I walked across the road to the court and looked at videotape of the accused man hunched over in an interview room at the North Shore police station. It’s a very small room, windowless.

Pūriri, which right now is littering the damp earth with delicate pink petals that look like fuchsia. It flowers and fruits until October. The song and heavy flap of tūī are heard throughout the university gardens; it’s otherwise a zone of quiet and, I suppose, thinking. One of the reasons it’s my favourite public garden in Auckland is that the trees and shrubs and flowers are arranged around buildings and offices and centres of higher education – it’s a garden within an ambient IQ. He has pleaded not guilty. “Everything that happened,” his lawyer Lorraine Smith said to the jury, “was accidental.”

The High Court at Auckland. Photo / NZME

Taiwan giant bamboo. Accurate claim: there are five poles of bamboo, in a secret little courtyard by the Thomas Building, that have grown six storeys in height, smooth giants reaching for the sky. There’s a goldish pond in the courtyard. It’s fed by an outflow pipe. Now and then this past fortnight I sit there with a thermos and a sandwich, and actually forget all about the trial, the CT scans of the baby’s fractured skull, the grieving family in the public gallery, the police photos of the house in Birkdale where the baby lived with his mum, and his aunt and uncle and their four little kids – one police photo is taken of a bath with toys floating in the water.

Ginkgo, common name maidenhair. They line the length of Princes St and right now their frail yellow leaves are falling in great clumps. The pavements are frail yellow. I remember the ginkgo trees from my happy four months in 2008 when I lived in a kind of tree hut in Albert Park – an upstairs room of an old stone building – as writer-in-residence of the Sargeson Fellowship. One sleepless night I wandered along Princes St and watched what I thought was a ginkgo leaf perform an especially exquisite fall in the light of a street lamp. Closer inspection revealed it as a kingfisher. That bright, plump bird was catching moths. The baby’s mother was called as a witness. She said, “He was a healthy baby boy.”

Queen Victoria's statue in Auckland's leafy Albert Park.

English oak, all throughout the Little England of the university gardens and that whole part of town, with the statue of Queen Victoria in Albert Park, the tree-lined avenues of Princes St and Parliament St and Waterloo Quadrant, reaching a point at the High Court, that attempt at the orderliness of English law in a corner of the South Pacific. A jury will deliver its verdict sometime this week in the trial of a man charged with the murder of a baby aged 10 months. I’ve seen a couple of jurors wandering around the university grounds at lunch these past two weeks. They look a bit lost in thought and, although they don’t look up at the trees, they walk very slowly.