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Photo: Stewart Sowman-Lund
Photo: Stewart Sowman-Lund

SocietySeptember 4, 2024

How two pōhutukawa ended up on Alcatraz

Photo: Stewart Sowman-Lund
Photo: Stewart Sowman-Lund

A recent visit to San Francisco brought an unexpected discovery for Stewart Sowman-Lund. He goes in search of answers.

Walk around the coast of San Francisco and you could forgive yourself for thinking you were in Wellington during summer. Narrow, winding roads, a constant view of the sea, a chilly breeze – and streets lined with flowering pōhutukawa.

Perhaps I was alone in that I’d never contemplated New Zealand has to share the pōhutukawa, our unofficial Christmas tree, with anywhere else. But a recent trip to the US city quickly taught me otherwise. It was on a day trip to Alcatraz Island where I made my first discovery. Turning a corner on a winding seaside path in front of the deserted prison that once held some of America’s most notorious inmates, I passed under the boughs of two fully grown pōhutukawa. They were perched on the edge of a cliff face with sweeping views across the city and the fog-covered Golden Gate Bridge. How, and more importantly, when had these trees made it all the way to an island in the middle of the ocean 10,000 kilometres away from Aotearoa?

Alcatraz Island shrouded by cloud (Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Shelagh Fritz, from the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, told me the pair of pōhutukawa on Alcatraz are close to 100 years old. They are believed to have been planted in the mid to late 1930s, she explained, which would mean they arrived on the island just as notorious gangster Al Capone – or Scarface – was being locked behind bars there. The trees were planted by Freddie Reichel, the first secretary to Alcatraz’s warden and someone who took an interest in developing the prison’s gardens. “Reichel consulted horticulturists of the time for recommendations on what to plant that would survive the tough seaside conditions, and these trees were recommended to him,” Fritz said. 

As this blog post explains, the gardens of Alcatraz had been tended to by military inmates dating back to the 1860s. But by the 1930s, when the famously escape-proof prison was housing gangsters, it was the maximum-security prisoners involved in keeping the gardens thriving. Though it’s impossible to know for sure, and it’s quite a strange image to evoke, that could mean that the likes of Capone and Machine Gun Kelly (not the musician) helped to nurture the trees that are still standing nine decades later. While we can’t be certain who planted them, this report from the Washington Post confirms that the pōhutukawa were “prisoner-planted” trees. That means they survived the decades after the prison closed, when the island was abandoned, and before it was taken over by the National Park Service in the early 2000s. 

The two pōhutukawa on Alcatraz could feasibly be the oldest in San Francisco, but they are far from the only flourishing Metrosideros excelsa in California. A planting spree in the 1980s means there are well over 4,000 of the trees dotted around coastal parts of the city. On Reddit, someone even asked last year about two “anemic looking” pōhutukawa “hanging out in the middle of the road near Hermosa Beach” in Los Angeles. But, as the New York Times reported over a decade ago, they’re a lot less popular in the United States than they are here – the article describes the trees as a “cursed relic” from a decade that had a lot of “ill-fated ideas”. That’s because the pōhutukawa’s ability to withstand rapidly changing weather conditions is in part thanks their thick roots which have led to warped sidewalks and damaged underground sewers. One San Francisco woman, who had a pōhutukawa planted outside her house in 1984, found that by 2010 it had caused the footpath to buckle and because of a local law, the council had tried to make her cover the bill.

This article from 2011 provides advice to locals on how to prune “New Zealand Christmas trees” in order to stop the roots from growing even more. Needless to say, pōhutukawa are no longer being planted in San Francisco, though you’ll still spot dozens of them decorating front lawns and street corners (you can be penalised close to $2,000 if you try to remove one without permission). There are even other varieties of the tree there, including one with a yellow flower that started as a mutation in Hawke’s Bay and was brought to California in the 1960s.

Thankfully, the two pōhutukawa growing on Alcatraz don’t seem likely to upset anyone. “They are thriving and are a perfect fit for life on the island,” said Fritz. A small part of New Zealand on display in the most unexpected of locations.

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Keep going!
Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

SocietySeptember 4, 2024

The Spinoff guide to life: How to walk through a door

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

You can barge through like a barbarian, or you can take a more civil approach. Here’s how.

There are two cardinal sins to avoid when walking through a door. The first is letting the door swing forcefully behind you, straight into the face of the poor chap following in your footsteps. The second is pushing ahead of someone heading through the same door you are – or worse still, shouldering them as you barge through. 

Committing either of these sins is the height of door-related rudeness, and all door etiquette stems from the desire to avoid them.

We’ll start with #1. Avoiding the face-slam requires first that you have some basic awareness of your surroundings – ie that you snap out of your reverie and/or drag your eyes from your phone and check whether anyone is walking behind you – and second, that you expend the effort it takes to hold the door if so. Assuming we’re dealing with a regular-shmegular hinged door, the gold medal of politeness involves opening the door and holding it while standing to the side, waiting the entire time the other person is walking through the door, and then closing it after them.

Note: This can be done whether the door is push or pull. If in doubt, the first person to reach the door in a group should end up at the back of the group once everyone is through the doorway. Few these days are so courteous: this move is the preserve of the true gentlemen (gender and class neutral) among us. 

Silver is when you walk through the door first, but hold it open behind you until the person following has caught up and you can see they will make it through safely, either because they have their hand on the door or because you’ve opened it wide enough that they can slip through without it shutting on them. Bronze is walking through the door without bothering to wait for the other person to catch up, but giving the door one little shove with the tips of your fingers as you breeze through to slightly ease the force of its backwards swing. Actually, this isn’t even bronze. It’s the participation award of decorum. 

Some FAQs before we move on to sin #2. Should men hold doors for women? No: people should hold doors for people, unless there’s a good reason not to (more on that later). What if someone is trailing quite far behind me? Do I still have to hold the door for them? The rule is that you should hold the door unless the distance is so great it would be ridiculous to do so and would make the other person feel uncomfortable. This requires judgement on a case-by-case basis, but err on the side of holding the door for anyone whose face you can see clearly, especially if you have made eye contact with them. 

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On to sin #2, the door-barge. Well, well, well. Look who’s in a huge, important hurry. Instead of knocking aside all the slowpoke grannies and tiny children making their way through YOUR door, take a moment to consider what matters most in the greater scheme of things (he tangata he tangata he tangata), and let others go ahead. 

Avoiding the door-barge usually looks the same as avoiding the face-slam, ie you simply open the door and hold it while standing to the side as the other person passes through. However, there are some door scenarios that involve an unspoken but clear right-of-way. If the door demarcates an enclosed space from an open one, as with elevators and trains, people in the enclosed space have the right to exit first. If the door can accommodate multiple people moving through it at once, as with sliding doors at a mall, just walk through – here, it would be strange and counterproductive to stand around saying, “After you!” Otherwise, it is chivalrous and proper to approach doors with a “you first” mentality.

What if someone beats you to the door and holds it open for you? Don’t try to one-up them, as though you truly were a competitor in the politeness Olympics (“No, no, after you! I insist!”) Simply make eye contact, thank them, and pass through the door. 

A critical addendum. If the circumstances of your life conspire against gold-medal decorum – if you’re running late for a flight, if eye contact burns, if you have recently given birth by C-section and it hurts to stand, if you’re in a catastrophically, misanthropically bad mood – it is open to you to skip any of the directives in this guide. After all, some things are more important than politeness. 

But if politeness is what you’re aiming for, now you know what to do. Go for gold. 

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