A walk in the park

This Aleppo pine remembers the New Zealanders who served at Gallipoli. While the seed for this tree came from Motuihe Island and was cultivated by Auckland City Council nursery staff, the Aleppo pine is native to the eastern Mediterranean, where many service personnel were stationed during WWI.

Auckland Museum's Curator Botany Ewen Cameron notes that while the exact origin of the Motuihe Island trees is unconfirmed, they were possibly planted with seed from Gallipoli by WWI soldiers returning from the war who were quarantined on the island because of the 1918 influenza outbreak.

This Aleppo pine replaced an earlier radiata pine, which had been planted on Anzac Day 1956 by Lt Colonel Cyril Bassett VC. The earlier radiata pine succumbed to a fungus, and was replaced by the tree we see today.

You can read more about the Lone Pine tradition and which pines grew where in this article from the New Zealand Journal of Forestry.

This camphor tree was raised from a cutting of a tree that burned to the ground during the 1945 attack on Nagasaki, but survived and bloomed again in later years. The camphor tree is revered in Japan as a symbol of hope and new beginnings.

It was planted by then-mayor Dick Hubbard on 9 August 2005 to mark the 60^th anniversary of the bombing. The Nagasaki City Council donates a cutting from this original tree to institutions who host the Hiroshima Nagasaki A-Bomb exhibition, as the Auckland War Memorial Museum did in 2005.

This olive tree was presented by the people of Galatos to the New Zealand Veterans of the Battle of Crete in 1941, in memory of the 'bond formed during and after the Battle of Crete.'

This pōhutakawa was planted on 11 November 2011, the year that Tāmaki made the Auckland Peace City Declaration. 

The plaque was unveiled several years later in 2017, to mark 30 years since the Nuclear-Free Zone was established.