Tag Archives: Abbie’s column

Abbie’s newspaper columns

Beware the bangalow (Arcontophoenix cunninghamiana)

A very handsome palm in the landscape, but scary weed potential

A very handsome palm in the landscape, but scary weed potential

The newest weed in the garden here is a palm. Not the native nikau palm, although that too seeds down freely and we regularly cull self sown seedlings. By definition, we don’t regard natives seeding down as weeds. No, the offending palm is the incredibly popular and very attractive bangalow palm. We have had it in the garden here for decades but it is only recently that it has started to set viable seed. It is a bit too efficient in the seeding stakes and, being attractive to birds, it has been dispersed throughout our entire property at a scary speed.

When alarm bells were first sounded in the Auckland area about bangalow palms, the howls of outrage and denial from within the nursery industry were instant and loud. We watched with a desultory interest and felt that it might not have been our industry’s finest moment. We need to take some responsibility for what we produce and we certainly have enough noxious weeds in this country without knowingly adding more. So we should look at the facts and the information, rather than immediately assuming that out of control bureaucrats are trying to control our livelihoods. The howls of alarm were such that the proposals to ban its sale were put on the back burner and its status is part of a five year review so nothing will happen quickly.

The so-called Chinese Windmill Palm (Trachycarpus fortunei) is also under threat of reclassification as noxious weed. While it has not proved a problem here in our garden, Mark has seen it seeding down and giving rise to a thicket of babies in the Nelson area. I have just found a photograph in the Encyclopedia of Cultivated Palms showing it naturalised in Switzerland. Plants with a climatic range from Switzerland to Nelson and Northland have scary potential. Trachycarpus fortunei is enormously popular throughout the world because it is generally hardy but with that tropical and exotic look so frequently sought by gardeners irrespective of nationality. The big advantage of trachycarpus is that you need both male and female plants to set seed so if female plants were culled, it would not be a problem. Our specimens in the garden here are male so no seed is formed. And Mark’s guess is that the seed is not spread by birds because it only seems to fall to the base of the tree and sprout there, which makes it much easier to contain. The seedlings can be mown off, grubbed out or sprayed. If it was spread by birds, we would hear a great deal more about it appearing all over the place in parks and reserves.

Side by side germinating self-sown bangalows

Side by side germinating self-sown bangalows

But it is the bangalow that worries us more and that is because of our personal experience. There would hardly be a square metre of our garden (which stretches across several acres) where we have not found a bangalow germinating and in those early stages, they closely resemble young nikau palms. Left to its own devices, this Aussie import will threaten our native nikau swamping out the habitat and growing at a hugely faster rate. The proper name is Archontophoenix cunninghamiana and it grows naturally in the coastal forests of southern Queensland down into New South Wales. It is a most elegant palm, tall and graceful and growing sufficiently quickly to give a fast result. It can reach 20 metres when mature, but like many palms, it takes up little space and casts little shade. It is easy to grow but it is also tougher than many palms and will tolerate cooler temperatures – light frosts, even – and damper conditions. It is that easy-going nature which has made it so popular and useful as a garden and landscape plant in relatively mild areas of this country. Alas, if it had only been dioecious, it could have had its wayward reproductive habits curtailed – dioecious meaning that you have both male and female and one of each is required for reproduction.

The bangalow seed is freely dispersed by that great seed dispersal machine that we have in our kereru or native wood pigeon. Presumably the seed casings taste delicious and the resulting guano gives the falling seed a good start after aerial distribution. And it sets a simply astounding amount of viable seed. When our specimen finally set seed for the first time, Mark just left it, noting how very decorative were the lavender flowers and bright orange-red seed hanging in voluptuous bunches. Within months, we were picking out the rash of self sown seedlings everywhere. We left one in the coldest, wettest spot in our garden just to see how it would grow. This is an area where Mark plants his treasures which need a winter chill – the deepest red hellebores, the Chatham Island forget-me-nots, trilliums and Himalayan blue poppies. Nowithstanding the fact that it comes from sub-tropical Australia, the bangalow is very happy there too, thank you. It is a worry.

It is still perfectly legal to buy and sell bangalows or Archontophoenix cunninghamiana in this country. If the prices I have seen on the net are a fair guide, you will pay around $150 for a reasonable sized one, up to an eye-watering $1700 for one already six to eight metres tall. For that sort of money, if you are starting out, our recommendation is to look at alternative varieties which don’t show the potential to be a noxious weed. It really does matter. Besides, as Mark will testify with the advantage of new information, it is an awful lot easier to plant something that will not require you getting out the extension ladder to take off the flowers and fruit when it is mature. Our recommendation, based on personal experience, is the Queen Palm, Syagrus romanzoffiana.

While on the subject of palms, which are a fantastic family of plants, we would like to pay tribute to the work done over many years by Colin Verlaan at The Palm Farm. Some readers may not realise this nursery is local but Colin has done more than anybody to make a huge range of palms available in this country at more affordable prices. Most of the palms you buy could be traced back to The Palm Farm as the main supplier. Colin has announced he is retiring and we think it might be for real this time (I am sure he has tried to retire before). While he may not agree with our opinion of the bangalow and the trachycarpus, we would certainly find common ground in admiring many of the magnificent and interesting palms he has made available. Mark has been gently building a collection of palms from him over recent years, concentrating on varieties which we think should be hardy in our conditions. He hopes to get his new Palm Walk planted sooner rather than later and is pleased he started work on it while he could still source a fantastic range locally.

All Gardeners Dream

Buying bare sticks with a dream but at least this Magnolia Iolanthe has the promise of flower buds

A letter to the editor last week talked about the Pukeiti dream as if Pukeiti had the monopoly on dreams. I would suggest that pretty well every gardener I know works on dreams. It is what keeps us going. Call it vision, if you prefer, or hope or trust – but every time somebody buys a bare stick in mid winter, they are dreaming of what it should look like in spring when it comes into leaf.

Often folk will plant a long term tree with a dream. No matter that they know they will not live long enough to see the tree reach maturity. When one heads out with the spade and the plant, the dream is of how it may look in the future, always with the hope that subsequent generations will appreciate it. If it wasn’t for the dream, why would anyone plant rimu, kauri, totara, davidia involucrata, monkey puzzle trees (Araucaria araucana) and any number of other high quality, slow growing trees? Maybe to plant one is a dream for the future, to plant many is an inspired vision.

I briefly toyed with a theory that ornamental gardens (those planted merely to delight the eyes and nose and not to feed the stomach) are based on dreams whereas the current rage of the productive garden (fruit and veg) is based on pragmatism and quick results. But Mark disabused me of that idea immediately. No, he replied. Of course all those fruit trees and edible crops are based on dreams. Romantic dreams, fantasies even, of The Good Life, of eating wholesome food that not only tastes yum but is free of dodgy chemicals, of children who frolic out joyously to pick the silver beet for dinner and then consume it with gusto. The mere term home orchard conjures up picture book images of apple trees laden with ripe red fruit awaiting harvest. Hark, is that a swing I see hanging from the branch of the old apple tree? (But not from our dwarf apples, unless it is for dolls). The common mental image used to have grass beneath the trees in the old orchard (entered by a lichen encrusted wooden gate) but that betrays my age. These days it is more likely to be comfrey carpeting the ground below. Or maybe borage to attract the bees. It really does not matter that we all know there is a big gap between reality and the dream. There is much that can go wrong. The barefoot children can be stung by the bees on the borage. The trees need pruning and, upon occasion, spraying if there is to be much of a harvest. None of it is as easy as it looks. It takes time and practice to learn. Some veg crops will fail altogether. Some will hardly be worth the effort while some will yield an embarrassingly large harvest, much of which goes to waste. It will rain and the ground will get soggy and boggy (garden dreams are usually sunny). It is the nature of gardening that it is unpredictable and greatly dependent on factors beyond our control – particularly the weather.

Ornamental gardening is even more based on dreams because it is purely aesthetic and there is not much of the quick random reinforcement of harvests, however meagre. Those who rip into gardening and view it like interior decoration will overplant badly to get a quick effect and then tend to lose heart when it all becomes an overgrown jungle too quickly. Creating a lovely garden and creating a lovely house interior are opposite ends of the spectrum. Interior design is about creating the perfect picture (hopefully combined with good function) from the start. It is a fixed picture, already finished in its perfection and it sets the standard to maintain (though in all honesty it is mostly downhill from then on as day to day living scratches the paintwork, marks the carpet and personal clutter builds up).

Gardening, on the other hand, is about putting the building blocks in place and allowing time for plants to grow with the hope that the mental picture will be achieved over time. It is a much less exact and precise activity, fraught with outside interference. A garden is never finished. It is in a constant state of change and prone to unpredictability. That is why we dream, why we build mental pictures of our goals.

We may put in a row of little plants at 60cm spacing and trust that in time the plants will close up together, grow uniformly and make a smart hedge. Or we may build a seat beneath an overhead frame and trust that the bare sticks we plant will come into leaf and flower to create a shady bower for summer. We may (and more should) plant an arboretum across many acres with fine specimens of trees for centuries to come. Or we may develop a large garden which we hope will create a magical place full of scent, colour, form and botanical interest as well. Or we may just plant an orange tree and hope optimistically that in the future there are so many oranges to harvest that it feels fine to squeeze the juice from half a dozen just to get a glass of fresh OJ a day.

They are all dreams. No, the whole issue about dreams here is about who pays for them. Once the public purse is expected to foot the bill, it becomes a whole new ball game. Some might think that only the very naïve or optimistic could believe that the Pukeiti dream of the founders is in safe hands in the public sector. What will be safer in the public sector are the expansionist dreams of the latter day guardians of Pukeiti and that doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the hallowed founders. But even they may have been surprised to read last week that Pukeiti is apparently some sort of de facto war memorial. Hmmm….

It doesn't have to be all or nothing – using native plants in our gardens

A magnolia to the left and silver birch to the right, silhouetted against the winter sky

A magnolia to the left and silver birch to the right, silhouetted against the winter sky

Mark has been hiding indoors on bad weather days, watching Victory Gardens on the Living Channel. It is not that it is a very good American programme, he is just addicted to TV gardening. But he was a little shocked recently by presenter, Jamie Durie. Now we are not going to be critical of said Australian who has done a great deal to sex up gardening in his native land and who is a young man of considerable talent. He has also managed to cross over successfully to American TV and we love him because it was he who has twice promoted our very own Cordyline Red Fountain on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Our home grown gardening celebs, such as they are, don’t fall into the same league. I don’t think any of our local candidates would have an alternative career stripping for Manpower Australia. But I digress.

There was Jamie, talking with passion about Australian native plants, brandishing what looked suspiciously like a New Zealand cabbage tree. It was. Our most common cabbage tree is Cordyline australis, you see, but australis does not mean it comes from Australia. The kind interpretation is that our iconic tree is now Australasian, just as our soccer team briefly enjoyed that curious status. Australia does have its own members of the cordyline family including congesta, fruticosa and stricta, but australis is not among them. We are now wondering where Jamie Durie thinks Dicksonia antarctica hails from. It is the Tasmanian tree fern which is a close relation of our own ponga trees.

But at least Jamie avoids the dreary political correctness of a pretentious novel I was recently reading for review. Describing the Christchurch gardens of the relatively well-heeled, the author wrote: “Most of the gardens were populated with imported English varieties, but there were a couple of house owners who had made some effort with native New Zealand vegetation, and the dark greens and rich browns stood out among the bleak, bare branches of the non-native trees that seemed to claw at the grey air.”

I read this passage aloud to Mark who instantly demanded to know what native tree is a rich brown. Shades of green, dear, they are shades of green. I envisaged the PC Christchurch of the future where gardeners could only plant native trees – towering rimus, totara or kahikeatea, perhaps, which on a small town section will remove all winter sun and light from your neighbour’s property. Or maybe some of the smaller trees such as the interesting dracophyllums or nikau palms which, typically, are forest growers, designed to grow in company and with the protection of surrounding plants. Let’s be PC and maroon these forest dwellers in a sea of suburban grass.

Our native dracophyllum, better in company than marooned as a lawn specimen in solitary splendour

While we are about it, shall we eradicate all the imported fruit trees, veg plants and even the ubiquitous grass? We do have native grasses but they are not usually the ones found in lawns, on road verges or pasture. I am not sure that the author had any understanding at all of botany, let alone gardening. I would be guessing that her derisive reference to imported English varieties includes the cherry trees for which Christchurch is renowned (hailing from Japan), the deciduous magnolias (from Asia), dogwoods (cornus – mostly American) let alone the rest of the options from around the world. As you may have gathered, I regarded that particular passage as particularly ill-informed and downright silly.

I will absolutely stand up for the preservation (and preferably extension) of our remaining forest remnants where the eradication of competing imported species is important. I think defending our diversity of indigenous plant material is equally important. I think incorporating native plants into our public plantings is highly desirable and that our native flora has a key role in our domestic and private gardens. It is what makes us different. But I am not going to put our native plants on such a pedestal as to declare that, by definition, native equals good, imported equals bad and reactionary.

We are hardly living and gardening in an environment where our native plants originally thrived. New Zealand attitudes to our indigenous flora have waxed and waned in recent years. The early settlers often found the native forests intimidating which is to be understood when you consider that all our plants here are evergreen whereas the majority of both native and introduced trees in Britain are deciduous. The forest remnants I have seen there are what I would call woodland. Our bush is akin to impenetrable, tropical forest without the tropical temperatures. I imagine they were terrifying to people more accustomed to woods of white barked birches, sweet chestnut or oaks carpeted below with wild bluebells and snowdrops. No wonder they planted to remind themselves of home.

Even thirty years ago, there was a pretty large-scale dismissal of our native flora as dull, boring and not worthy of garden space. Native plants on sale were under-valued, so sold cheaply and seen as utility – a bit like riparian plantings today. All function and no aesthetics. Then came the big turnaround and suddenly native plants were all the rage. Led by government agencies, public plantings were heavily dominated by native plants. This crossed over to private gardens and planting native became the higher moral ground, a point of principle. A stream of Bright Young Things could be found browsing plant stocks, determined to buy and plant only natives. Though they would make an exception for an apple tree (from Central Asia), a macadamia (from Australia) or an olive tree from Greece. There was also a myth that you had to plant natives to feed our birds. In fact you have to plant the right plants to encourage birds and our indigenous birds are not fussy about whether it is a native or an introduced plant.

The author of whom I am so critical is caught in this PC time warp. As always, the answer lies in the middle ground. We have many fantastic native plants ideal for gardens. We also have boring, utility native plants ideal for land reclamation, shelter or nurse plants. But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing at a gardening level. It is the vast array of plant material that we can grow here, the mix of indigenous and introduced, which makes our gardens interesting. Those Christchurch houses so maligned for their plantings are probably much better served by deciduous specimen trees which allow light and winter sun through. We tend to have cold houses in this country and we don’t need to make them any colder by planting so that they are in the winter shadow of evergreens. Bare branches silhouetted against a winter sky can be seen as a beautiful tracery just as readily as the aforementioned bleak, bare claws. Long may common sense and aesthetics triumph over ignorance, however well intentioned and at least those Christchurch houses planted trees rather than keeping everything to under a metre in height.

A letter from a ratepayer

Mr David McLeod, Chair
Taranaki Regional Council,
Stratford

Dear David,
I was terribly thrilled to read your press release about having secured the future of Pukeiti. That is so exciting.

I see that you personally rank the importance of Pukeiti right up there alongside our maunga, our mountain, Taranaki. Now I don’t want to be accused of raining on your parade, but you don’t think that maybe you were getting a little carried away with the hype of the situation? That perhaps you have overstated the importance just a trifle? I admit I don’t know you (you don’t mind me addressing you as David, do you? It is just that as you are quite good at spending my money, I feel as if I have some sort of relationship with you). Maybe you do in fact wake each fine morning and look out at both Mount Taranaki and Pukeiti and feel a sense of identity. Maybe when your travelling children are asked where they are from, they identify themselves as coming from Taranaki, the home of Pukeiti Rhododendron Trust. Maybe you have enjoyed such frequent visits to Pukeiti all your life that you feel a deeply personal sense of ownership and belonging. Alas, much of your electorate has already voted with their feet and decided that in fact Pukeiti is not such a part of their very identity – that is the whole nub of the problem. Visitor numbers simply haven’t been high enough to support the dream – a dream that belonged to somebody else. But I don’t want to be negative. I am assuming that you and your councillors did a breakdown on visitor numbers to work out how many were local and how many were tourists? And as you are so hellbent on making it free for everybody, I guess that your public consultation showed that ratepayers are glad to pay so that tourist attractions have free entry for visitors from out of the region.

I mention this, David, because in your press release you approved the takeover of Pukeiti “in the wake of positive feedback during public consultation…” That is absolutely wonderful, no doubt about it. I wouldn’t for one minute want to be accused of pouring cold water on your plans. It may be that your networks in the gardening, plants and garden tourism scene are hugely better than mine. That would explain why nobody I have met in the last six months has been consulted. My networks must be terrible. I am talking to the wrong people. No matter, you have apparently found the right people to talk to. Mark says he would really like to hear the names of all three of them.

But lest you think I am moaning, really, David, my reason for writing is to offer you some help. Your press release says that ” …work will begin soon on plans to develop and enhance the property and its plant collection. This will be similar to the planning processes which resulted in the very successful redevelopment and refurbishment of the Council’s existing heritage properties, Tupare and Hollard Gardens. We are looking forward to involving the Trust, PKW and a range of people in this exercise.” That sounds absolutely splendid, very consultative. It is just that I am pretty sure that this has all been done already, quite recently in fact, and I still have the discussion papers in my archives. Actually it is not that long ago – 2005 in fact and I can date it exactly because it all happened when Mark and I were flicking off to look at magnolias in northern Italy. I think along with all the discussion papers from Big Names like Boffa Miscall, Berl and others, somewhere, just somewhere, I even have a letter from your CEO, Basil, telling me how much ratepayer money had been spent on these plans. These sums (measuring into the multi hundreds of thousands of dollars but I would need to find the letter to confirm exact figures) included plans for Hollards and Tupare as well, but the ratepayer has already paid for big plans to take Pukeiti in to a new era of popularity.

Sure, it has to be admitted that some of those plans may have been just a tad grandiose. I think they even included a new home for the wandering gondola, along with a little shopping arcade, of sorts. A tourism hub, even. And fabulous (and I mean fabulous) visitor numbers.

But a little bird told me, and I wouldn’t want to be quoted on this because I haven’t had the information officially and it may be completely wrong, that after Regional Council paid for all those plans five long years ago, the Pukeiti Trust Board commissioned another review and set of development plans immediately after. I think what I was told was that the annual grant of $50 000 of ratepayer money, allocated by Regional Council, was further reinvested in this new set of plans to save Pukeiti. I just recall some discussions at the time because some of us felt that maybe they could have been spending that windfall of 50 grand on another gardener instead of yet more development plans. I am just guessing, maybe putting two and two together and making five, that that was why Pukeiti went ahead and appointed a new CEO with a highly relevant record in managing Speedway. I recently found a newspaper clipping where that new CEO declared that within six months of him starting in his new position, Pukeiti would be re-branded as a functions and events centre. Funny thing that. Six months came and went and it doesn’t seem that long after, the new CEO also went. Made redundant in preparation for Regional Council taking over, do we think?

David, I don’t want to be a moaner but it just may be that there are plenty of recent reports already available to be drawn on, without having to start again. We don’t want to be accused of re-inventing the wheel, do we? Or to make ourselves vulnerable to an accusation of pouring more rate-payer money down the wishing well. Maybe somebody could pick up the phone and have a chat to the immediate past CEO to find out what did and didn’t work?

You don’t think, do you, that maybe it could be argued that it is a teensy weensy little bit precious to say that the cost of Regional Council picking up the tab for Pukeiti will have “minimal impact on average regional rates — over a full year, less than half the cost of the $14 entry fee Pukeiti has been charging up until now” (your words, not mine). That might be true had all ratepayers demonstrated that they wanted to visit Pukeiti at least once a year. A veritable bargain in fact. Such a shame they didn’t. Had they shown this burning desire to visit, Pukeiti would not be in the pickle it is. Instead they would have been run off their feet, even more so on their gold coin donation days when the financially impoverished would have flocked there. In fact, if you take the cost of running the place and divide it by the number of visitors, it just may be that you will find the cost of attracting every single visitor is somewhere nearer $70 per person. Even if you double the attendance in a short space of time, it is still around $35 of ratepayer money to give every visitor free entrance.

Lest you think I am being grumpy, David, I am already on public record as saying that for us personally, Regional Council making sure that Pukeiti survives is, on balance, a good move. We know what Pukeiti’s standing has been internationally, which is more than many of your ratepayers who just have to take your word for it. We also know which key individuals worked tirelessly to earn Pukeiti that credibility. In fact we know quite a bit about the history of Pukeiti. We just hope that you and your fellow councillors have a pretty good grip on it all too After all, you wouldn’t want history to record that you were the people who were all too ready to spend other people’s money trying to realise a lost dream. The Pukeiti dream of Douglas Cook and the founders has long gone. Now you have a large garden in a cold and damp out-of-the-way position, served by a really bad road, branded with a plant which used to be incredibly popular and of high status but few people want any longer.

Do let me know if you need the reports I mentioned.
Kind regards,
Abbie

Today’s column is but the latest in a series over recent years. Earlier columns on this topic include:
1) A tale of Pukeiti Rhododendron Trust and ratepayer funding Published March this year.
2) Taranaki Regional Gardens Part 1 – first published late 2004
3) Taranaki Regional Gardens Part 2 – first published, apparently January 2005 – the best piece of writing for those who can’t be bothered wading through the lot.
4) And Taranaki Regional Gardens Part 3 – which rather tells about the treatment of an unsolicited submission. When in doubt, levy accusations of self interest.

Correspondence from Rewi Alley and holding back the encroaching deserts in China's northwest in the early 1950s

My late mother-in-law’s archives came home recently. Very late mother-in-law, to be honest. She died about 1985 but the local museum decided recently her archives were of no interest and returned them. After the slight chagrin at being told this, we are very pleased to have them back because we found all sorts of interesting material. The detailed instructions on how to wax your camellia blooms can wait (that is for those devotees who are absolutely dying to learn the lost art of waxing camellias). One of the historical gems from the collection was the correspondence from Rewi Alley.

If you are much under the age of 50, you may have to google Rewi Alley. He is certainly one of our most interesting and colourful ex-pats having upped sticks and gone to live in China in 1927, there to stay for the rest of his long life which he dedicated to improving the lot of the Chinese peasant. He saw out civil war, acute famine, the Japanese invasion, the rise to power of Chairman Mao and communism, the Cultural Revolution and China’s isolationist policy, achieving venerated status by the time he died in the late 1980s.

Do not ask me how Mark’s mother, Mimosa Jury, ever found an address for Rewi Alley in Peking, as it was still known back then. But find one she did and that can not have been easy, given that she was writing to Alley in 1970 when the Cultural Revolution and the rabid ideology of the Gang of Four saw his position as a foreigner in a closed country more precarious than at any other time of his life. Knowing the late parents in law as I did, I would guess that Felix was trying to get access to some of the special plant material which, even then, was known to be native to China but still not introduced to the west. Mimosa was a thwarted researcher by nature so she would have taken on the task of ferreting out the information. Together, they were going to bring Camellia Diplomacy to China and open doors.

Rewi Alley’s reply is dated October 11th, 1970. His first paragraph speaks volumes about the good nature and resignation of somebody already in his seventies with strong humanitarian principles, politically left wing and taking the long view.

“Dear Mimosa and Felix Jury:
Thank you for your letter about Camellias. I do not think that it is of use trying to contact cadres of institutes now. Most are away for re-training, re-moulding, and politics, so I do not know how long this stage will take, or when such contacts as you propose will be possible again.”

He follows this with a paragraph professing to share their interest in camellias, though it is pretty clear that this is more courtesy than fact because he really doesn’t know anything about them, except for one interesting observation: “… it’s seeds are valuable for food oil. Many counties, especially in the South Kiangsi, are completely dependent on the seeds for their food oil supply. Possibly the olive would give more oil seeds per mou than Cha Shu (the camellia), but then Cha Shu grow wild all over the hills and can be helped to spread.” Best guess is that he is talking about Camellia oleifera, although you can also extract edible oils from other camellia species. This was news to me. Should the end of the world as we know it arrive, we may be self sufficient here in cooking oil between the camellias and our solitary olive tree.

But Alley’s heart lay in reafforestation long before we in the west started to worry about global warming and conservation. He writes with conviction of the pressing need to reclaim deserts, like those of Sinkiang and he enclosed a typed copy of an article about a 1950s reclamation project in the north western area of Liangchow or Wuwei. The article is not attributed but I would guess that it is one of Alley’s own (he was a prolific writer). Globally, it would be hard to find areas with more inhospitable and harsher conditions than the northwest of China. Think of the well known Gobi Desert, though it is in fact the Tengri Desert he writes about – dry, windswept and bitter cold in winter while summers are dry, windswept and hot.

I would assume that the deforestation of China, which is referred to as having taken place over centuries, happened because the population depended on timber for both building and cooking but gradually population growth led to greater demand which outstripped the ability of forests to regenerate. Once denuded of its former cover, the land loses its top soil, floods become more frequent and there is nothing to stop the desert sands from blowing in. From time to time we hear about the spreading of the deserts in Africa but in terms of land mass degraded by encroaching desert, China has the worst problem.

Reference is made to “a low bushy tree, the sand date, locally called the ‘hero of the desert’ because it grows almost everywhere”. The sand date may be hardy but it took three attempts to get it growing, involving digging holes three feet deep (a metre deep is a huge hole to dig for every tree), carting in top soil and watering regularly – all done manually in the early 1950s. Water of course had to be carried with buckets on poles, presumably quite some distance. I tried to find out what the sand date was because it didn’t sound like the date palm which grows in marginal areas of North Africa. It is more likely to be the Chinese date or Ziziphus jujuba.

Aside from the details of this early and apparently successful small effort to hold back the desert, the political context is equally fascinating. Reading between the lines, the original letter sent from Mimosa to Rewi Alley must have mentioned something to do with forestry and described it as being beyond politics. New Zealanders, in those days, tended to see politics as a separate entity altogether with little impact on daily lives (how often did we used to hear the cry that sport has nothing to do with politics?). Rewi Alley was not having a bar of that. Not for nothing had he spent his life working for change in China. He was very much a mouthpiece for the new order of Maoist communism.

“Politics teaches why and for whom a thing is done. If the people can best be served by forests which will prevent floods and drought, then we have forests allright. And national effort is spent in getting them. Which means that it must be a mass movement, and to generate a mass movement, we must have politics. Which is seen here as the task of the government – to so raise the consciousness of people that they activate their minds and hands to carry through the job in hand.”

Consider yourself told. It may be that totalitarianism is a more effective means of countering deforestation and global warming than unfettered free enterprise and market forces. And we should continue to remind ourselves that in New Zealand we have just as a poor a record of deforestation. We are just lucky we don’t have deserts moving in.