Rudman's city: Leaning tree only old bit of shelter

By BRIAN RUDMAN

What a weird and wonderful world it is that allows you to switch granny's life support system off with a nod, but forces Auckland City to go through 18 months of hearings to get rid of the mortally wounded One Tree Hill pine.

It wasn't always so difficult. In August 1962, when vandals used a crosscut saw and axes to all but fell the existing pine's partner, there was no such pussy-footing. No sooner had the perpetrators struck than the authorities, "with great reluctance," finished the job.

They acted swiftly on the grounds of public safety and you have to wonder why such a commonsense response isn't good enough today.

This week, experts gave the lone pine three years at best, following chainsaw attacks in 1994 and last September. Needle growth has slowed, foliage loss has accelerated and they worry that the supporting cables will not stop it collapsing in a storm.

Given such circumstances, does it really need an expensive, time-consuming resource consent hearing to conclude the obvious - the tree must come down, and sooner, it seems, than later.

And then comes the fun part: the question of what, if anything, to put in its place.

One option would be to turn to its current Maori name of Maungakiekie for a clue. The kie-kie, however, turns out to be a climbing shrub that needs other trees for support. On a No Tree Hill that's hardly an option. Anyway, it turns out that before it was named Maungakiekie it was known as Te-totara-a-ahu or "The totara that stands alone."

The totara in question dated back to about 1600 and sprang from a totara stick used to sever the umbilical cord of a high-born baby boy named Koroki. The stick in question was stuck in the ground atop the buried placenta and grew into a sacred landmark.

Whether it grew on the summit or down on the western slopes is not clear. In 1852, "some Goth" of a settler, to quote a newspaper of the time, cut it down for firewood.

In 1874, then-landowner Sir John Logan Campbell twice tried to grow native trees on the summit and failed. The second attempt involved puriri surrounded by a shelter-belt of pines. The natives died, but five pines survived.

Another native was planted about 1910 but died. Through the 1930s the park board debated whether a replacement totara should be planted but nothing happened. War, it seems, intervened. By 1940 there were only two pines left.

In 1948, at the unveiling of the obelisk atop the mountain, the park board chairman told local Maori that if they wanted to plant a replacement totara, the board would care for it.

No response came to this offer so in August 1949 the board went ahead and, with due ceremony, planted a young totara to commemorate the tree "which gave the hill its name." It was reported that "the life of the remaining pines is drawing to a close."

The board's action sparked local Maori into announcing that they intended to plant a totara of their own. "Two Tree Hill" was the tongue-in-cheek headline in the day's Herald.

Nothing apparently came of the Maori totara. By April 1952 the domain board totara was ailing, "despite regular watering during the summer months." It was decided to replace it with a "well-established totara."

The files are silent on what happened next. But 10 years later, when the second-to-last pine was savaged, there was no mention of totara. One presumes the extremely exposed site, along with the poor soil, made life impossible for them.

The question now is, what now? The experts say a pohutukawa is the tree most likely to survive, but a totara would have stronger historic and cultural significance. But they caution that the hilltop site is "an extreme environment for the establishment of trees."

The option they don't canvass is an obvious one: bow to nature and plant nothing. After all, the survival rate of trees on One Tree Hill over the years has been poor. Is there anything wrong with leaving it bare? Or if we do have to have something, there's always a Len Lye wind wand or a Telecom cellphone tower.