Trees & Planting

My sister’s section in Churton Park sits on ground heavier than mine, and when she had the back lawn re-laid she went straight from bare dirt to turf on the same weekend, keen to get it done before a family gathering. That lawn was a bog by the following spring and a cracked, hard patch […]

A client in Ngaio once pointed at a bank thick with agapanthus and told me it was “holding the section together.” We dug a single test hole through the middle of that planting to check depth before starting drainage work nearby, and the roots stopped at barely 150 millimetres. Below that was the same loose,

The job in Titirangi was meant to be a straightforward deadwood clear-out on a rimu overhanging a deck, nothing to do with the two mature kauri standing twelve and eighteen metres further down the section. It still took most of an hour of planning before anyone picked up a tool, because the access route to

The pōhutukawa on that Papamoa section had a canopy shaped almost like a wave, dense and rounded on the landward side, thin and wind-combed on the side facing the beach. Nobody had trained it that way. The onshore wind and salt had done it over twenty years, and it was actually a reasonably healthy shape

The oak had stood in that Fendalton garden for the better part of ninety years, and it went down on a September morning after a nor’wester had been gusting through the low sixties for about six hours. It did not snap. The whole root plate tipped, taking a slab of lawn with it a metre

The macrocarpa in Hillcrest was easily eighteen metres tall, leaning slightly toward next door’s carport, and the owner wanted it gone before it dropped a limb on someone’s roof. The complication was not the tree’s size. It was that the trunk sat 1.4 metres off the boundary, the canopy overhung the neighbour’s section by a

The path in question was poured in Wadestown sometime in the 1970s, dead flat according to the owner, and it stayed that way for decades until one joint near an old puriri started rising by a few millimetres a year. By the time I looked at it, the middle slab had heaved almost forty millimetres,