Australian National Arboretum
The National Arboretum in Canberra is doomed to fail, thanks to years of mismanagement and poor planning, an Australian forestry expert has warned. Source: ABC News
The Arboretum has struggled to deal with hundreds of dying trees, which former forester Peter Marshall says is a problem caused by poor science and poor management.
Mr Marshall said the arboretum had ignored basic science by planting trees too close together.
“The arboretum is a wonderful concept. It’s visionary and exciting. But at the moment it’s a slow-motion train wreck and the future for it is grim,” he said.
Mr Marshall said the arboretum would be compromised as trees that were planted too close together continued to grow.
“It goes back to the original concept of the hundred forests, which sounds like a lovely idea, that trees should be planted together so they’ll come up in a giant gothic cathedral,” he said.
“But it’s actually not feasible with the type of trees that have been chosen; most of them are shade-intolerant trees.
“The trees have been planted far too close, and they haven’t received form pruning or thinning in a timely manner, so they’re stressing each other out and basically the arboretum is killing itself.”
However the arboretum’s director Adam Stankevicius said it was normal to see a small proportion of trees die.
“I don’t think the public need to be concerned at all, we’ve got over 44,000 trees on the 250-hectare site at the moment,” he said.
“The Arboretum was always conceived as a place of experimentation and a place of research, so included in those 44,000 trees we’ve got 31 species that are listed as threatened.
“We weren’t always expecting that they would necessarily all flourish in the Canberra environment.”
He said that some trees were planted on an experimental basis, and were not expected to survive.
“It was an experimental forest … we were anticipating that there would be some losses,” he said. “If we’ve got about 1000 trees that are struggling, and we’ve got 44,000 overall we’re looking at about maybe 2%.
“I think that’s a relatively small and manageable percentage.”
Mr Marshall said the arboretum’s problems would worsen as trees grew.
“I know there’s some fabulous people who’ve invested their lives in this place, they love it,” he said. “But I don’t think they know what they’re doing.”
