TREE-PLANTING IN CITIES

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume I, Issue 68, 9 July 1873, Page 3

TREE-PLANTING IN CITIES

We take the following from a recent copy of the Melbourne Argus. The subject is one deserving of attention even here. There can be no doubt about the good which would result from a general system of planting shrubs, in the vacant ground in the city, and cultivating the back yards, instead of allowing them to become receptacles of every sort of filth. The statements are as applicable to Auckland as to Melbourne. The Argus says : —“ As the planting season will shortly commence we draw attention, as we have for several years past been in the habit of doing, to the desirableness of every person taking advantage of the opportunity to put in trees and flowers wherever they are likely to grow, all over Melbourne. There was a time when a tree in any of our streets was a rarity, and when back premises were hopelessly given up to dirt and nothing else. But it is not so now, as anyone may satisfy himself who will take the trouble to explore the narrower highways and those still less conspicuous thoroughfares we call by the ineuphonious name of ‘ rights of way? Even in the densest neighbourhoods there are now green spots, which, by a little attention, are made to look cheerful at all times. But they are only the exceptions. It is the rule for back-yards to be back-yards, and nothing more — desolate, dreary, dank, and unwholesome, without a green leaf or a bright flower to balance their untidy squalor. It is something, however, to: have drawn attenion, not only to the agreeableness, but to the wholesomeness, of planting little plots, which, though measured by inches only, are capable of yielding returns of incalculable value. On one occasion, when we made an appeal of the kind we are now making, a correspondent (Mr. Ford, of Swanstonstreet) was good enough, in expressing his satisfaction at the endeavours we were making to promote this kind of social improvement, to furnish us with some quotations from an article by Mr. D. S. Fish, a well-known authority on hygienic horticulture, in the Gardeners' Chronicle, agreeably bearing on this subject; and they are so pertinently corroborative of the desirabilitv of the practice we are now urging that they need no apology for our again quoting them. Mr. Fish says:— ‘ It is only through plants that the great problem of the day, ‘ What shall we do with our dirt ?’ can be solved. There is no other mode of extinguishing dead matter but by its conversion into living substance, and plant manufactures are alone equal to this stupendous undertaking. The antidote to pollution is living plants ; these absorb, transform, utilise, and annihilate it; they weave these elements of disease and death up into the very staff of life. The chief remedy for the alarming death-rate is more trees around the suburbs, all the open spaces of the city filled with sweet flowers. Fight fever with the sweet incense of lovely flowers, annihilate it with the absorbing force of fever-consuming leaves.’ Now, all this as possible in Melbourne, where the atmosphere is not yet sickened with the belchings of a thousand tall chimneys, as is the case with some of the manufacturing towns and cities in England. Of Mr. Hodgkinson’s labours in this direction it is quite superfluous to speak, but it is to the public generally we now again appeal, and urge—the time being apt—to fill up every inch of vacant ground with some plant or tree, whose growth shall be a constant acknowledgement —if in no ether way, in the hygienic benefits conferred —of the little trouble of tending it.” [The above, taken from the Weekly News, is worth the attention of settlers in Poverty Bay. —Ed. P.8.5.~\