Roots, Drains & Hard Surfaces

A Sydenham villa off Colombo Street, July 2022: the gully trap outside the laundry was lifting its grate every time the washing machine emptied. The owner had had the drain “cleared” three times in two years at NZ$180 a visit; nobody had put a camera down it. When we did, the picture showed fine roots

In February 2019 I was called to a stormwater line that had stopped flowing behind a 1.6-metre timber retaining wall in Rototuna, on the northern edge of Hamilton where the housing runs into the old peat paddocks. The wall held up the neighbour’s lawn. Behind it, the drainage coil that was supposed to keep water

My brother bought a 1950s brick and tile house in Mornington in 2022, on one of those Dunedin streets where the section steps down the hill in two terraces and the driveway climbs from the road at about one in seven. The first winter he rang because the driveway had lifted: a slab about 2.4

In February 2023 I spent three weeks in Auckland on storm response after Cyclone Gabrielle, working out of a yard in New Lynn. One job was a Mount Albert section off Carrington Road: a 1.8-metre timber pole retaining wall holding up the back lawn, and above it two silver birches and a big old totara.

When the old paling fence between my place and the neighbour’s in Sydenham finally gave up in 2022, the problem was not the fence. It was the 25-metre macrocarpa standing 1.2 metres inside my side of the line, with a trunk over a metre through and roots you could trip on for 8 metres in

In February 2025 I put a straight edge across a concrete driveway on Glandovey Road, Fendalton, and measured a 38-millimetre step where a root had lifted one slab against its neighbour. The tree was an English oak, trunk 920 millimetres across at chest height, planted by the look of it when the house was built

A Hamilton East landlord sent me three photographs in May 2024. The first showed a row of six liquidambars on the berm along Grey Street, mid-colour, half their leaves still on. The second showed the front spouting of his 1930s villa, full to the lip with compacted leaf. The third showed the downpipe head with