Chewed trees get residents barking

Residents of Rangitatau East Road are prepared to blockade the road if the Wanganui District Council continues with the tree "pruning" it started last week.
Diana Loader, owner of Nuts-n-May, said the concerned residents including Dianne Blair, Prue Carver, Prue Richards, James Carver and Bridgit Carver-Vitens, who grew up on the road, were not attacking the contractors, they said. They were attacking the council policy that allowed a machine to shave off large parts of the trees, instead of pruning the overhanging branches.
Residents of the road were shocked to find that pruning had started without their knowledge along the first few kilometres of the road on Friday.
The pruners were back yesterday morning, but told Mrs Loader that they had a hole in the hydraulic pipe and could not do any work.
He had also said he was under instruction to "cut back hard".
The effect of the pruning left the trees with a ragged "chewed" look, and created an "absolute eyesore" down what was an otherwise very beautiful stretch of road, she said.
Mrs Loader said she was a former president of New Zealand Tree Crops, and the way the trees were cut back "was no way to prune a tree".
It could also harm the tree's health because it chewed the branches, and disease could get in and infect the rest of the tree.
Many of the trees had some historical significance, and some were more than 100 years old, she said.
"This road is a beauty spot, but it's not any more."
Other trees, including some Japanese walnut trees, had been poisoned when they could have just come in and cut them down, instead of leaving them to die and look awful, and potentially fall across the road, she said.
They were also quite a way off the road, and did not seem to present any immediate threat of overhanging.
If they had thinned them back, there wouldn't have been a problem. It was ignorant, she said.
"The council shows by their policy that they don't value it [the road]".
Dianne Blair had taken matters into her own hands and was pruning her own trees, including plane trees, copper beeches, green beeches and Japanese walnuts, which were planted on her property, but overhung the road.
Many of the trees had been planted by her uncle, and were very old.
Years ago, when the area was under the jurisdiction of Waitotara County Council, the same thing happened, and the group had "stood forth" and got the council to promise they would write a letter to residents to notify them of their intentions to prune exotic specimens along the road.
But this had not carried over to the new council, she said.
They would definitely blockade, or stage some kind of protest if the pruning continued, they said.
As a result of numerous phone calls and faxes to the council yesterday, Prue Carver said they had managed to get the pruning stopped for the moment, until the matter could be discussed at the next Rural Community Board meeting on December 16.
The residents would be attending the meeting to petition support for "decent policy".
 
STANDARD
Wanganui District Council infrastructure manager Julian Reweti said that with such a vast rural district, all rural vegetation control was carried out mechanically.
It is the standard method that has been in place for many decades, he said. "This methodology for scrub cutting is to a national approved standard and used in other regions for their rural networks. At this time, this is the only methodology funded by the New Zealand Transport Agency."
Mr Reweti said that in the district's rural network, any scrub within 4.5m height of the road and within 300mm of a surface water channel is considered to be intruding into the transport corridor and a risk to safety.
However, in response to yesterday's protest, the council called a halt to the scrub cutting activity along Rangitatau East Road, as an interim measure.
"This issue will be considered by the Wanganui Rural Community Board and their recommendation will be forwarded to the council. But the key considerations are safety, alternative costs and funding." Mr Reweti said.