We didn’t have the money, so we had to think

Brilliant news - the Lotteries Commission have supported our pioneering seed island project for another 3 years. It takes roughly 10 years for many indigenous plants to fruit so that birds and other natural dispersers (wind, insects etc.) can work their magic. Lotteries funded us then, and they’ve supported us again, which is superb. Heartfelt thanks, and to Gisborne District Council’s Natural Heritage Fund, Trust Tairāwhiti and the Tindall Foundation, who shared their faith in our ‘seed island’ experiment.

While many people claim its too slow, difficult and expensive to grow native forests, that’s because they treat the ngāhere like industrial plantations - growing the trees in nurseries and planting them in grids - like spreadsheets lain over the land. 25 years ago at Waikereru, we had the idea of planting groups of berry-bearing native trees cropping at different times of the year to feed the birds, along the foothills of our highly erodible Tairāwhiti hills (where the soil is richest, dampest and most accessible). As Ernest Rutherford said about doing science in New Zealand, ‘We didn’t have the money, so we had to think!’

It worked a treat. The birds eat the berries and fly up into the hills, dropping seeds wrapped in packets of nitrogen into the most inaccessible nooks and crannies. No contracts, no health and safety, no holiday pay - just a steady supply of delicious, varied kai to feed them; and the plants find their own favoured locations. Survival rates are high, and costs as low as they can be, with excellent pest and weed control courtesy of Nic and Guido of Ecoworks NZ. After 12 years, bare pasture across the Waikereru hills has been replaced by closed canopy forest. The dawn chorus wakes us up in the mornings - the most glorious sound in the world.

It wasn’t a controlled trial, though, so three years ago we worked with Manaaki Whenua geologists and naturalists to design a ‘seed island’ trial with different combinations of fruiting trees in different micro-environments, to see what works best - ‘The right tree in the right place.’ Our aim is to find the most efficient, cost-effective ways of speedily restoring bare, collapsing hillsides into native forest, holding the land together, enriching the soil, cleansing waterways, restoring biodiversity and creating a wonderland of indigenous plants and animals. In Tairāwhiti, this is desperately needed.

‘Recloaking Papatuanuku,’ in fact.