No secret to planting
I had been planting trees and shrubs for over 20 years and I didn’t realise that poor planting was such a problem - but clearly, it was then and it seems that it still is.
The age of wisdom
New Zealand finds itself in a fascinating point of arboricultural time
What’s so hard about soil
When I was a young horticulturalist each and every soils teacher seemed to say something along the lines of ‘soil is soil and dirt is what you get under your fingernails’, some of them would go on to say that they were taught that, but it ‘reflected their sediments exactly’ – and they wondered why ...
The journey to good
A journeyman is an old-school term for a worker who is skilled in a given trade, someone that had completed an apprenticeship but had not yet mastered their craft. A journeyman was someone who had spent enough time working on their craft to have gained a qualification but needed to spent time working in their ...
When 5, which is 6 becomes 8
I have a wisteria that grows and grows, but where it goes nobody knows. I train it and shape it to follow a plan but it still it grows to follow its nose… and I don’t know why. As a self-respecting arborist, I dislike vines – with the exception of grapevines and hops, but I ...
Be properly amazing
New Zealand Arborists can’t prune. For some, a generic sweeping statement like that will be offensive, but some will agree. If you’re a kiwi arborist, and you’re offended, it’s probably because you can’t prune – this, you may well find offensive, yet others will probably still agree… Don’t get me wrong kiwi arborists are amazing ...
Carbon in the time of Covid
This actually has nothing to do with Covid-19 or Cholera, which the title is very loosely taken from. If you cast your mind back a few months, the world was fixated on carbon-sequestration. It seemed like every few weeks another tree planting programme was announced; a million trees here, ten million trees there, a billion ...
Henry’s answer to a complex problem
Henry Louis Mencken is famous for many things including saying; “for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. Henry was an American satirist and cultural critic who died 1950’s – by all accounts he was free with his opinion and took no prisoners. I suspect he’d be finding easy ...
Zen and the culture of pruning
The Skype meeting was tedious and I found myself checking FaceBook. Checking FaceBook out of the corner of my eye; one can never look away from the camera during an online meeting. A discrete click, a sly scroll and ‘Pruning is cultural not scientific’, that’s worth a read. Pruning is cultural not scientific, I’m sure ...
Facilitation in a time of change
– the control of exotic vegetation on Auckland’s volcanic cones The volcanic cones of Auckland were taken from the Māori about 150 years ago; the cones were and are considered ancestral mountains, they are Tūpuna Maunga. During those 150 years, Māori had little if any say in how the mountains were used or what happened ...