Ruud Kleinpaste: Community Gardening and Restoration

A couple of hundred years ago, our Planet and our Aotearoa looked quite different. 

There were huge forests and wetlands, vast tussock lands and cool, high altitude alpine gardens. Birds and lizards, insects, spiders, fish and native frogs called it their home. 

Slowly Homo sapiens started to turn things around; habitats disappeared, mining, urbanisation and an economy that only thinks of growth-at-all-cost. 

Of course, some Parliamentarians –like Blind and deaf Freddy– are not always Nature-Literate enough to steer our bit of the planet in the right direction. 

Communities and Environmental organisations are doing their thing to restore our Land. I am convinced that, together, they form the largest movement in the world and even Blind and Deaf Freddy never saw that coming. 

This is the time to plant our whenua with locally-sourced native trees and shrubs. I’m talking about the Garden, but also about the Earth around us; the reserves; the walks-ways, you name it. 

Waiwhakareke Natural heritage Park is a 60 hectare park in the making. On the NW side of Hamilton, near the zoo. It’s really a wetland area with Biodiversity of the Hamilton Basin. Waiwhakareke (horseshoe lake) brilliant!  Council, Hamilton Zoo, Waikato Uni all together! 

The last few days (Thursday and Friday) schools have been descending on the park; kids of all ages have been planting and my job was to totally disrupt the whole event, by pulling out huge earthworms when the holes were dug. 

And Flatworms slithering on the soil substrate. 

We discovered beetles and maggots in decaying tree trunks – the biodiversity turned from “Ooooh” and “Yuck!!” to a competition and utter delight. We found toadstools and other fungi; lichens and mosses 

We set up a fine-meshed “mist net” to see if we could catch some birds to band with tiny aluminium rings with even tinier numbers on it – that’s for the kids who wanted to work for DOC and become scientists. 

 

Today we carry on, not just with kids, but with the Community of Hamilton, to plant and restore this magnificent Garden, which will look like the bush, all those decades ago. 

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