DEVONPORT MOTHER PRODUCES MEASURING TAPE AT SCHOOL GATE, INSISTS ZONE BOUNDARY RUNS THROUGH NEIGHBOUR'S HEDGE

A Devonport mother arrived at the school gate on Tuesday afternoon armed with a 30-metre builder's tape and what witnesses described as "a real head of steam", convinced the in-zone boundary cuts through her neighbour's pittosporum hedge and not, as Auckland Council maintains, the footpath.

The dispute concerns a property on Calliope Road and the fact that the neighbours' youngest, Felix, was accepted into the school in February. The mother across the fence, Annaliese Crockford-Wynn, was not. She has been measuring ever since.

"I'm not being difficult," Crockford-Wynn told The Daily Yarn, holding one end of the tape while her eldest held the other. "I'm being precise. There's a difference. The hedge has crept. The hedge is the issue."

Another parent at pickup, Marguerite Halloran, said the scene had become a fixture. "She was out there last Thursday with a clipboard. This week it's the tape. Next week I imagine it'll be a surveyor, or possibly a barrister. She did mention a barrister."

An Auckland Council spokesperson said zone boundaries were "determined by street address, not foliage", and gently suggested residents refrain from "measuring private hedges without consent". They added that the matter was "not, strictly speaking, a council issue", which is the line they always take.

Back in 1974 a boundary dispute round here would've been settled at the RSA over a jug, but the tape was still out at 4.15pm, and the hedge, for what it's worth, hadn't moved.