There's quite a fuss over a cedar tree in Otumoetai that's giving the homeowners grief.

The Tauranga City Council has decided to cut it down. And good on them. It's become quite a pain for the good folk who live there now.
I'm sure the original homeowner who grew it would agree that, when it got too big, it should be removed.
How do I know this? Because Claude
Forster, my late grandfather, planted it.
This dawned on me this week, while viewing the story on SunLive.co.nz and reading of the current owners' battle to get rid of it. It wasn't till I spotted the picture and recognised Grandad's former boat garage – that the penny dropped. I immediately commissioned our Research Department to investigate. (Mum dusted off my grandmother's diaries.)
Jean's parents, Claude and Vera Forster sold their Waikato farm and moved to the Bay about the time I started my career in finger painting at Karaka Road kindergarten. By the time I was at Tauranga Primary School, they'd had the house built on the corner of Glen Terrace and Otumoetai Rd in 1967. They moved in September with their grey cat Mockles, who originally was my father's kitten, Smokey. Years earlier, Dad had given the cat to pacify Carol, his future young sister-in-law, who at the time was inconsolable, having broken up with her boyfriend. When Carol left home, Mockles had stayed on the farm with Claude and Vera.
While my Gran was a meticulous recorder of events and words, my grandfather was a word tinkerer. Claude had a peculiar, but very entertaining habit of messing words around. It was pretty amusing when I was six. A one-lane bridge was a 'one brain lidge.” Hence Smokey became Mockles. Go figure.
But back to the offending cedar tree.
Gran's diary tells us that on August 22, 1967 on a visit to Carol and family in Hamilton she and Claude stopped at Keat's Nursery in Leamington near Cambridge. Gran was on the lookout for trees for their new house in Glen Terrace. She bought two camellia (red and peach blossom); a pink pearl rhododendron, a cryptomeria …. and, you guessed it, a cedar.
The Vauxhall Velox must have looked like a mobile greenhouse wending its way back over the twisty Kaimai road with that much foliage in the back seat. At least I assume they took the Velox. You wouldn't have wanted that much shrubbery in Gran's lime green Fiat 500, even with the sunroof open.
Gran's diary reveals the trees, including the Phillipson's now infamous cedar, were planted on the section on August 31, 1967. Grandad would have positioned the shrub 'like a sock on a chicken's lip” (go figure) on the corner of the section, to block out the ugly transformer on the street. Vera was probably giving the orders.
Later the tree was also handy for hanging up the flounder net to dry and tip out the sea lettuce. (yes, Tauranga had it then, too!) His old boat, built from kauri from the farm, is these days housed in my brother's shed and still in great nick. It used to be parked in the garage next to the cedar.
The house was pretty darned flash in its day, in fact it was a showhome when first opened. Built by Bernie Russell, a partner of Premier Homes, it was a showpiece for Rylock joinery, for which my dad, Mick, was the franchise owner. Gran had a few choice words for the son-in-law about the prospect of having strangers gawking around her new house. Twice, in fact, because the house Mr Hampshire later built for them in Maxine Place, Matua, was also a showhome.

Grandad's chainsaw
Even though Grandad had sold the farm, he kept his prized chainsaw. If my engineer-fanatic brother hadn't later dismantled it with the aim of building a go-kart or a hadron collider or whatever, it would have been fitting to use it now, to cut the damned cedar tree down. But alas, the chainsaw has long been recycled.
And what would Claude say if he knew his cedar tree was wrecking the house and making life a misery for the occupants? I can hear him now…
'Cut the bugger down. I'll go get the chainsaw.”
Gran might have something to say about that, however.
I had thought about staking a claim to the timber, under the Treaty of Waitangi. Customary rights, and all that. But, nah, sounds like hard work. I'll let the council pay for it, thanks.
So if it helps put the Phillipson's minds at rest, and the council, for that matter – the tree wasn't planted by the council and is most likely on private land. What's more, speaking on behalf of the planter's descendants, you can be assured they wouldn't have wanted the tree to stay to wreck the house and people's lives.

And Mockles? Well the diary reveals that he stunned everyone by turning up to the housewarming party on October 28 and being very friendly. Until then, Mockles wasn't famous for his socialising, coming from a farm. It must have been a bit of a culture shock for the old cat, leaving the wide open spaces of rural Gordonton, to the bustle of Otumoetai suburbia.
I remember the unfortunate demise of Mockles, also meticulously diarised. One night the old bugger didn't make it across Otumoetai Rd.
Chances are, he's buried under the cedar tree. That could explain why it's grown so well over the last 43 years.
And if the city council needs any more background facts on anything that happened within a 100 mile radius of the city in the last century, just ask my folks.
It's bound to be noted in Gran's diary.