What grows up, must come down

November 2024

It follows that once I'd identified the plants in the garden, the bad guys would have to go., so #3 on the project plan is:

3. Need to remove weeds and potentially invasive trees and shrubs from the property.

Weeds will be an ongoing issue. There are also different levels of invasiveness and living in New Zealand's weediest city means making decisions about what you can live with. Or, perhaps more importantly, what the bush can live with and what will kill it. Also I live in a buffer zone of an ecologically important park, which means I have to control certain weeds or risk being educated at.

Tall tree privet in the garden

The problem is that the New Zealand climate is very conducive to fast and strong growth, which is why agriculture and forestry make up our primary industry in all senses of the word (economists will get that joke). What suits grass and crop growth, also suits unwanted plants and this has become a knock down, drag out fight for the health of our native ecosystems. Part of the problem, at least in suburban areas is that the fruit of the garden weeds are very tasty, thank you very much, and birds spread them across the area and into native bush.

That's one of the reasons that biological controls have been introduced. Fortunately for butterfly lovers, one of these controls is the Honshu white admiral, Limenitis glorifica. It was introduced in 2014 to tackle Japanese honeysuckle (one of the weeds in my garden), but it hasn't established as well as it was hoped, even with some people giving an unofficial helping hand by raising more in captivity. They haven't made it to Auckland yet, which is why the photo is not one of mine, but taken from a sighting in the Waikato from the ever-generous iNaturalistNZ. I am fair less of a fan of another introduced biological control, the buddleia weevil, but that's a different story with far less beautiful photographs.

Photo by caiden_b

For most other weeds, we simply have to get down to some hard work. Or splash the cash for an expert to do it. What the garden bioblitz identified was a number of established trees that are banned species. One of the bad guys in the garden is tree privet. Another is monkey apple. They were both likely planted before the ban as garden plants and both my neighbours and our shared drive have a profusion of well-established examples, which means we'll be pulling seedlings out for a long time to come. The way the ban works is that if a tree was planted before the ban was in place, there is no need to remove it (but please remove it).

A healthy monkey apple growing beside the boardwalk in the garden

The Auckland Council's pest search, part of their conservation website, gives lots of information about pests and how to get rid of them. They recommend that trees over four metres are removed by an arborist and who are we to go against that sage advice. So Stu from Shoreside Trees came and gave us a quote, and with money left over from the moving budget, his team came mid-November and got rid of two large tree privets, four tall monkey apple trees and a queen of the night, which I know as night jessamine, another banned shrub. They also removed a hedge, which I'll blog about separately, because myrtle rust deserves a post of its own. The arborists did a great job and cut the branches and trunks into logs, which I could use for earth stabilisation and in a size that weedy me (no pun intended) could cart around.

Whilst I dislike the use of poisons, the stumps were pasted to try to prevent regrowth, because these plants are good at resprouting, and I now have some spaces to plant native trees with a specific aim to raise the amount of food sources in the garden for birds. That's the fun part and the next step.

5. Need in-fill planting where problem trees removed.