The Taipei City Government has planted more than 4,000 cherry trees around the city in the past five years to cater to the public’s tastes without considering the suitability of the trees to the local environment, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City councilors said yesterday, urging the city to develop a comprehensive public arboreal policy and tree planting program.
Amid the popularity of cherry blossom festivals in Japan, Taipei City’s Parks and Street Light Office, Department of Civil Affairs and several other departments have invested more than NT$15 million (US$500,000) in planting 4,158 cherry trees in city parks and other locations since 2008, and the distinctive trees can be spotted in all 12 city districts, according to information from the office.
DPP Taipei City councilors Wu Su-yao (吳思瑤) and Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) yesterday questioned the large-scale planting of cherry trees, saying the nation’s warmer climate is an inappropriate environment for the trees, which are best grown in mid-latitude areas.
The increasing number of Japanese showa cherry (昭和櫻) and somei-yoshino cherry (吉野櫻) varieties planted in the city also shows the city government’s lack of originality and its failure to plant trees or flowers that can highlight the city’s distinctive features, they said.
“If the city government insists on planting cherry trees, the local varieties of Taiwan cherry (山櫻花) and double cherry (八重櫻) would be better choices. We do not oppose the planting of cherry trees, but the city should not follow the frenzy for cherry blossoms blindly,” Wu said.
Taiwan cherry trees still outnumber other varieties in the city, with 3,064 planted in the city, compared with 625 somei-yoshino cherry trees and 267 double cherry trees.
However, last year the number of somei-yoshino cherry and Japanese showa cherry trees planted in the city was 232, which was higher than the number of Taiwanese cherry trees.
Huang Shu-ju (黃淑如), chief engineer at the Parks and Street Light Office, said it planted most of the cherry trees in Yangmingshan (陽明山), as well as in Shilin (士林) and Beitou (北投) districts, and did not allow other departments or local boroughs to plant cherry trees as street trees in downtown areas.
“There are more people asking us to plant cherry trees in their neighborhoods, and we won’t agree until proper assessments have been done,” she said.
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
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