City’s riverbanks infested with weeds
As we set about reclaiming our homes from the middens of Christmas packaging and associated debris, wouldn’t it be great if Christchurch could set its sights on reinvigorating our crumbling stature as New Zealand’s Garden City?
The nickname is becoming a marketing myth, increasingly divorced from reality, with vast swathes of the city devolving into an unloved, weed-infested dump.
I recently spent time in Canada’s Garden City, Victoria, an impeccably-maintained visual symphony of a place, zealously proud of its botanical splendour, with blazing flowerbeds, velvety lawns and litter-free green spaces.
In downtown Victoria alone, 1040 hanging baskets drape the streets, each containing 24 plants.
Two people are employed full time to water them. Walking the talk on Victoria’s Garden City credentials is at the core of the city’s visitor strategy.
Here, the Christchurch City Council’s ‘‘no-mow’’ policy for our riverbanks reeks of an illconceived attempt at culturally engineering Christchurch into some sort of pre-colonial swamp, circa 1840, unmolested by the march of European sensibilities or Round-up.
Dressed up as a noble endeavour to molly-coddle the habitat of native species, it’s not just the whitebait that are spawning in the waist-high riverbank vegetation.
Have you noticed the growing size and scale of the rats? Is it really culturally correct to allow this new scruffy riparian aesthetic to result in riverbanks ballooning in broom, gorse, convolvulus, yellow flag, old man’s beard and other invasive nasties?
It’s a similar riverside story along from that great sweep of walled grey, the Canterbury Earthquake Memorial.
The city council’s extremist surrender on riverbank maintenance, supposedly in the name of supporting inanga and water quality enhancement, looks more like a cheap and nasty costcut.
A recent letter writer to The Press, Jeanette Forbes, nailed it beautifully:
‘‘This is a city environment, not a paddock.’’
One of my favourite walking circuits from my home in Huntsbury leads me down to the Heathcote River on Palatine Tce. With the riverbank now ‘‘returning to nature,’’ surely the maintenance contractors could at least rip out the triffid-like weeds consuming the footpaths and prune the overgrowth from engulfing the bridge crossing.
I now tend to pull out as many weeds as I can, as I roam. Perhaps this no-mow policy and the wider concerns about maintenance standards at the likes of parks and cemeteries, has fuelled a copycat tone-change across the city, contributing to the galloping upswing in waist-high vegetation growth billowing from berms and vacant sections.
What has happened to our sense of pride, our civic pride?
You might still be armwrestling with your insurer, you might well be exasperated, you might be an absentee property owner, but do you really have to give your neighbourhood the twofingered salute with your ugly apathetic neglect, in the process?
It is your responsibility to ensure the property is maintained and the grass is trimmed.
I checked in with the city council to gauge their willingness to enforce these base responsibilities.
A council spokesperson confirmed that, so far this year, they’ve investigated 711 fire hazard complaints about overgrown grass.
Let’s turn up the heat on these recalcitrants – including the council. Lodge a complaint about fire hazards on (03) 941-8999. Hammer them.
An equally insidious postquake blight to beset suburbia has been the dumping of household goods/furniture, on the footpath.
The council doesn’t provide an inorganic collection in Christchurch – and frankly, nor should they.
The Ecodrop Recycling centres will happily accept the majority of unwanted household goods for free.
The footpath is not an Ecodrop, nor should it be acceptable to blithely hope that some passing stranger will gladly upload your unwanted stuff, eventually.
This lazy, piggish practise is a total insult to the surrounding neighbourhood.
Several community members tell me tenants are prime offenders. If you collar a dumper in action, photograph them and dob them into the council, because the evidence threshold is high.
One of my new year’s resolutions is to join some community working bees.
The council’s local park rangers co-ordinate many of the volunteer community groups. They’d love to hear from you too. Let’s try and restore some credibility to our Garden City credentials in 2018 and clean up Christchurch.
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