KEY POINTS:
After weeks of chaos along Queen St, three giant nikau palms have sprouted out of the scorched earth near Vulcan Lane. Wood pigeons may not be far away.
Perhaps it's time to take seriously Auckland City's draft 10-year plan "to strengthen, grow and celebrate Auckland's urban forest".
Council
agendas are littered with 10-year draft plans, ranging from the worthy to the seriously loopy, which rapidly sink without trace. But I'd like to think the urban forest plan - there truly is such a beast - will do better than that. Still, if it does disappear back into the bureaucracy to gather dust, all is not lost. The greening of Auckland, which is what this proposal is all about, has started, plan or no plan.
I guess that when change is gradual, those living through it tend not to notice. It wasn't until I ran into a prominent artist who'd had to abandon a planned painting project because of all the trees that had sprouted up around Auckland over the past 30 or 40 years that I started thinking back.
He'd returned to his boyhood haunts near Kingsland, hoping to capture the hilly roofscapes he recalled. The houses were still there, as were the roofs, but the corrugated iron vistas he was after were now overwhelmed with trees of all shapes and sizes.
Auckland City's proposed plan defines an urban forest as including "all urban vegetation, including habitats and ecosystems". It casts the council as regulator, educator and "influencer" of the forest on private land, and as partner and advocate with others.
But first, the city council has to play catch-up. As a forester, it has been slack in its record-keeping. The best it can come up with is that the city has about 70,000 street trees and 50,000 park trees. There is limited knowledge about what species they are, to say nothing of age and condition. A database is being compiled. As for the private parts of the forest, your backyard and mine, the only records are of a few protected trees.
As a subtropical city, Auckland should have a tree canopy target of 35 per cent. Council officials "guess" we have a way to go.
Ironically perhaps, one of the most significant contributors to the new urban forest has been state highway builder Transit New Zealand.
In recent years at least, the road builders have disguised the scars alongside each new motorway with mass plantings of quick-growing native bush. Indeed it's doing so well I'm warming to Dr Harold Coop's repeated suggestion that some kauri and totara should be added to the Grafton Gully groves.
Apart from the aesthetic benefits of healing the motorway scars, the newly planted bush also creates wildlife corridors across town to the Waitakere Ranges in the west, to the Domain, the waterfront and across to the North Shore parklands on the Chelsea coast and to the gulf islands.
Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee, who has presided over the transfer of rare species back to the Waitakeres, looks to the day every Aucklander could be wakened by the call of the bellbird.
As political dreams go, that is surely one of the more benign.
He's optimistic that On Track, the Government rail operator, will adopt the practices of its road building rivals at Transit and green the rail corridors as it upgrades them. Not only would it hide the graffiti, it would also give the birds more cross-city linkages.
Planting vegetation that provides fly-in fast-food stops would be an added bonus.
Just along the road from my place, a venerable old puriri plays host each year to a tui, presumably one that has made the trip across the harbour from Chelsea. This year it made side visits to my backyard foliage.
Boring, say my friends from the eastern suburbs and Mt Eden, who are used to whole families of tui dropping in.
I look forward to the day when, with a little help from Transit and On Track and the 10-year plan, I can pretend to be bored as well.
