Those Weeping Willows,

Te Aroha News, Volume XIV, Issue 2124, 5 July 1898, Page 2

Those Weeping Willows,

When the London season is over and all the fashionables go north for the grouse shooting or vanish into the bwiss Engadine, what is known among newspapers as the ‘ big gooseberry season’ ie ushered in. In.Te Aroha we are well in the doldrums and the veriest trifles are greedily snapt up for serious discussion in the wineshops, at street corners, or across shop counters. The lopping of the Domain willows is a case in point. The Commissioner who had the supervision of the trees in hand, is a candidate for municipal honors; that is quite enough for the purpose. In addition to being a commissioner and an hotel-keeper he is a practical gardener—gardening in ffact is his amiable hobby and seldom a day passes that he does not spend an hour or two among his vegetables. As a gardener and arboriculturist however, many hold his views are unsound. He plants his cabbages in rows, or if that is not the objectionable feature, some other objection equally valid is laid to his charge, and moreover he claims that the lopping process recently applied to the Domnin willows is just exactly what those grateful shade trees required. The proposition submitted for discussion by some of our local critics is, as far as can be gathered, as follows : Is a man qualified to act as a councilor who holds unorthodox views on the subjects of planting oabbages and pruning willow trees ? Though the connection at first glance appears some what remote it is wonderful how unanimous and emphatic many of the critics are. We are not qualified to speak on the subject of willow prunning, the head and front of the candidate’s in question offending, but a gentleman whose home is at the Thames, and who lately resided at Waiorongomai, informed ,us the other day that in his opinion the policy adopted with respect to the willows is the correct one and cited a parallel case within his ©wn experience. Mr Burton, a late proprietor of the Junction Hotel, Thames, had a couple of willows (since cut down) growing in front of his hotel which were famous for the luxuriant foliage of their widespreading feathery branches. Mr Burton, a noted gardener of the scientific school before he took to hotel keeping in his declining yearp, brought about this desirable resu t by annually lopping the trees as bare as a barber’s pole. In less than six months, our correspondent says, the shoots had attained such proportions as to give one the impression that they had never been cut at all. The growing season for willows is from August to December, and they require during that period copious supplies pf water.