Garden team leader and curator Alan Matchett said he was sad to see the old English elm go after strong winds split one of its buttress roots on Sunday. He believed the elm had been planted in the early 1900s, but staff would be analysing the tree after it came down to determine its exact age.
"We’ll be counting the rings."
The damage had rendered the tree unsafe, especially as it stood next to the playground near the Peter Pan and Tinker Bell statue, he said. Mr Matchett said it would be replaced with "something more ornamental", possibly a magnolia or a cherry tree.
Several other trees had sustained serious damage in the weekend’s wild winds, including a large pittosporum, and a native beech tree in Lovelock Ave, near the sports field, which had its "whole side knocked out".
"There’s a whole lot of damage around."
The elm was survived by a smattering of other large English elm trees in the garden. The species was thought to have been introduced to Britain by the Romans, and was once common across England, North America and Asia. Millions of the trees were killed in the 1970s by Dutch elm disease, after a virulent strain was introduced to Britain in a log shipment from North America. The disease appeared in New Zealand in 1990, at Myers Park, in Auckland. An outbreak was reported last month, also in Auckland, when 18 elm trees were removed from Mt Hobson by the Auckland Council as a biosecurity measure.
In 2008, the Ministry for Agriculture and Forestry, a predecessor of the Ministry of Primary Industries, announced it was "no longer co-ordinating or contributing funding to the national Dutch elm disease control programme."
The ministry said at the time the disease was "not a priority when compared to other organisms".
