Spare That Tree

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 321, 17 August 1945, Page 9

Spare That Tree

HE evening before Arbor Day, R. L. ‘" ‘Thornton spoke from 1YA in his very best style, and it is a thousand pities that the talk was not listed. His plea was mainly for native trees. No other country had such rich capital in its forests, and no other country set out to spend it with such fierce and reckless extravagance. When he pointed out that almost any native tree we plant this week will make good timber within 100 years, it struck me that it is a sign of our youth that 100 years seems far too far ahead to worry about. We have little of the spirit of the diligent farmer in our Latin grammar book, who planted trees whose fruit he himself was never likely to see. In the towns this neglect has meant mainly an aesthetic loss, but in many country districts it is now bringing the economic disaster of floods and

erosion. It is no use nagging the overworked individual farmer about a problem that has grown too big for him to deal with alone. There would seem to be a case, though, for reinstating soon the public holiday of Arbor Day which lapsed in 1916, and keeping it as a period of national effort in which we all take some responsibility for a matter on which our prosperity depends. "Trees can do very well without us," said Mr, Thornton, "but we can’t do without them."