(music)
Barbara has just celebrated her twenty years volunteering with us.
So she has been at Long Bay longer than I have been, I’ve only been fifteen years, so
she was here when I arrived, working on our riparian planting, which is
the stream edge below the Vaughan Homestead.
And also she was part of the dune system planting that we worked on many years ago to establish
the Long Bay dunes. And that’s been a massive project because that’s helped stabilise
our dune system to keep our park from being eroded away.
So yeah, she’s been here a very long time, and I’m lost for words for
how many hours and her passion and dedication for this space.
I love gardening, I come from a farming family, both my grandfathers were market gardeners.
This is my favourite, favourite, favourite, favourite trail.
I mean it really is, it’s just… it’s wonderful. I mean look at this.
You’ve got to love, you’ve got to love a puriri. I mean this is just…they’re gorgeous.
I think for me, in the beginning, it was…
I was desperate to get out into a park. I needed to be in the soil…and then
you’ve come to a stage in life where you want to give back.
Any of the plantings that we’ve got here we have an initial year
when we plant them, and then quite a few… probably about
two or three years where we infill and we work with it.
We planted together didn’t we, we did a lot…
We probably had about ten, a core of ten people planting in this area here for
a number of years, what eight, ten years overall? - Yeah…
What has happened at Long Bay is that we’ve learned through
trial and error, so for something like for instance propinqua…like
this is a coprosma propinqua, and we didn’t realise quite how beautifully we could get
cuttings from this. So we got a few in that planting, and then we took cuttings – coz
you know we are a bit greedy – and we got a whole load more. So we did a lot of infill,
so this is beautiful and it loves the wetland as you can see.
Yeah we’re looking for two things: weeds and how our trees have grown.
Oh don’t you adore those flowers at this time of the year…beautiful.
And what we’ve tried to do is for instance have a decent…like a pōhutukawa
so we’ve got some really…
when we’re all long gone these big pōhutukawa and the big puriri and the kahikatea which
are coming up and they’re gorgeous…they’ll be the ones that actually survive. And these
will have done their business, they’ll have helped the nursery and then they’ll have
built up the various big mamas and papas that are here.
When people come to the park they mainly think about the recreation side of things
but we’ve got this massive conservation programme as well, and that’s where Barbara’s
passion sits, so she’s spent decades now looking after our streams, our dunes…I remember
years ago she was doing some propagation for seeds, so she’s actually grown hundreds
of plants that have been planted out here.
What you’re seeing here is what we called 100 Acre, the 100 Acre planting is
basically that. It’s a public planting that happens every year, and the public plantings
have moved from there but we did that for very, very many years. And you can see how
it’s done in groups, and it’s really lovely to see the first ones have come up.
I started because there was a public planting advertised and I thought: Oh…I’d
like to make a contribution, I’ll go along to the public planting. And at the public
planting I found out about the volunteers and I’ve been here ever since. The reason
I come is the satisfaction of seeing the change. It’s almost a slow-motion thing.
I’ll come along for months and months and nothing much is any different, just keep on planting
and planting and planting. I come back in twelve months and suddenly there’s growth
there, and I come back in two or three years and I’ve got a little forest coming away
there, and that’s the satisfaction I get. I remember standing on this bridge, looking
out over there and it was just grassland…grassland with this muddy creek running through the
middle. Now I can stand here and I’m in the middle of the bush, and it’s still a
bit of a muddy creek, but not as muddy and it’s surrounded by the bush and birds and
it’s beautiful. And I’d like to think that my grandchildren and great grandchildren
could come along here and enjoy it and say: Oh, this is, this is nice this place…
We’re luckier as volunteers that we can come in, and we can do what we know we
need to do, and we know it’s all for the good. We don’t have to prove ourselves to
anybody except ourselves, and really the trees they’re just, they’re saying: Thank you!
And also you meet people, and that’s all it is.