rom the Waimakariri River it is a short drive into Christchurch. If Canterbury is the most European of our landscapes, Christchurch is certainly the most English of our cities. Arriving on the treeless plains around the Avon, the mostly English immigrants immediately set out to recreate a replica of home. Walk the streets of Christchurch today, wander through the square with its London planes, or sit under the willows along the Avon and share your lunch with the ducks and you could very well be by the original river in England - except for the swans being black, not white.

Planting of exotic trees started early here. The Deans brothers, who settled at Riccarton in 1843, started importing trees almost immediately, as did the French at nearby Akaroa. Tree planting tended to follow trends, as one of our earlier amateur naturalists, Thomas Henry Potts, noted. Although he arrived in Canterbury in 1854, a mere 15 years after Pakeha settlement had commenced, he observed:

There is a fashion for planting trees as in other matters; old settlers can doubtless recollect the rise, progress, and decay of the willow and poplar period, which was succeeded by a furor for the blue gum Eucalyptus globulus; this stately, fast-growing Australasian in its turn had to succumb to the fresher attractions of the Californian coniferae of whose economic uses but little that is certain is yet known. How long will the needle-leaved pines hold their own on public favour?'

Oh, Thomas, if you could only see them now!

With the settlers came a huge increase in the number of insect pests. In 1860 W.L.T. Travers published a paper called 'The Bird As the Labourer of Man' and described:

... the extraordinary clouds of moths of all kinds which arose from the ground as one walked, either through the tussock-covered areas or through fields of cultivated grass. In the Rangiora, district trenches were often dug to intercept millions of caterpillar when marching towards growing crops, and the ravages they committed when no means of protection existed were very serious

It was partly to provide this 'means of protection that the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society was formed in 1864. The gentlemen of the society promptly imported a large number of birds, which included among others sparrows. In later years when suggestions were made that this had been a less than inspired choice the society, along with most other societies throughout the country, hastily denied responsibility.