Ross Gardiner has been volunteering at Manawa Karioi Ecological Restoration Project for 20 years, starting in early 2000. He is our resident expert on local planting, his knowledge of the site and history of the project is invaluable. We asked him some questions so we could record and share some of that expertise with other restoration enthusiasts.
Photos by Ness Patea
Why is this restoration project important to you?
It's come to be important for an increasing number of reasons. I initially got involved because for a number of years I had been thinking of getting involved in a tree-planting scheme because it seemed like the right thing to do. When I was a child a remember hearing of the devastation wreaked on the kauri forests (I grew up in Auckland, which contained a remnant of kauri forest in the Waitakere Ranges) and felt that one day I would like to do something to reverse that damage.
After I moved to Wellington in the mid-1990s I heard of a tree-planting project on Matiu island, but I didn't know how to get involved. No-one had websites back then, so finding a contact for a project could be difficult.
I went overseas for 18 months and when I returned I was determined to find a tree project to get involved in. Within a couple of months, I found out that a friend was living at Tapu Te Ranga marae and that he was a key person involved in the planting of what marae founder Bruce Stewart had deemed a "bush and bird reserve". It was then that I realised that when I had stayed at the marae for a few days 10 years earlier, the planting project back then had only just begun.
I didn't have much knowledge of forest ecology but was keen to learn. At that stage, most of the people involved in starting up the project had moved on, but there were a few knowledgable people around so I listened to what they had to say. That gave me a good grounding in the basics, and over the years I learned a lot by trial and error. I read as much as I could on the subject of native plants and did the Open Polytechnic course on Native Plants/Ecological Restoration (I passed with straight A-pluses!)
After a few years of involvement, I began to realise that there were a whole lot of other aspects of the project that were important that I hadn't necessarily been aware of at the start. Firstly, it wasn't just a tree-planting project, or even a "bush and bird reserve". It was far wider than that so we adopted the concept of being an "ecological restoration project". This acknowledged the concept that we weren't planting just a narrow range of trees, but we were making sure we were planting as many species that had become very rare in the Wellington area, thus restoring a balance there. We also understood that an ecosystem also involves lizards and invertebrates.
The spill-over effect of birds moving outwards from Zealandia (the "halo effect") has added another factor. I never thought that one day it would be common to see kaka flying around Wellington, and they have been making Manawa Karioi part of their range for almost 10 years now.
The sense of community has been another aspect that has become important to me. I liked Bruce's idea of "setting the land free" by making it accessible to the community, and by involving the community. This gives people a sense of belonging, and it has really paid off as we now get a lot of volunteers from the local community who have come to appreciate a great community asset in their neighbourhood.
What changes have you seen over the years?
When I first got involved, it was largely a hillside covered in gorse and blackberry. Much of Te Ahi Kaa was overgrown with those plants, and was impassible in some areas. There were few other tracks. Most of our time was spent (wasted) cutting back the gorse and blackberry by hand, which was like sweeping the tide back with a broom. In 2004 we got a tractor in with a flail deck (a hardcore mowing attachment) which laid waste to the track-blocking weeds and suddenly our work got easier. We spent years planting fast-growing trees along the track edges to create a hedge to shade out the gorse and blackberry, thus keeping the tracks passable. We cut a few new tracks too. I had been involved long enough to view the project as being one of trying to eradicate the gorse, and never viewed it as anything but that. I largely viewed it in terms of 'where to attack the gorse next?'.
It wasn't until about 8 years into the project that I ran into a guy who had been involved in MK around the time I started, but whom had not been involved for several years. He told me that he had been for a walk there and described it as being 'like a park'. This made me step back and take a fresh look at it, and I realised that he was right. Instead of the main tracks being paths cut through the gorse, they were now more like a bush walk. We had begun to plant some of the rare and unusual species along the track sides and at track entrances so that as soon as people entered the site they could get the feeling that the bush was a lot different from surrounding areas of natural regeneration, which typically have a smaller range of plant species. In turn, this increase in forest complexity has seen an increase in bird species too, with kaka, kereru and karearea now being seen there; and with common species such as tui and piwakawaka becoming more abundant.
Another change has been the increase in volunteer numbers. We really struggled through the 2000s, and our progress was slower than it should have been. But there was a huge explosion in public awareness of community-based ecological restoration (one Christchurch group described their project as "a mini-national park in your back yard") combined with a local community who appreciated having such a project that was open to them to visit and get involved in. All it took was having effective communication and easy access to the relevant information to get things happening.
What do you think is the most important thing that you have learnt since being involved in the project?
I think it was viewing the project as ecological restoration rather than simply being tree-planting. When a forest habitat is created, it has many knock-on effects both ecologically speaking and in terms of human involvement. People come to realise that "wilderness" isn't just something in a national park, but something that is all around them. I love the fact that Wellington is in a transitory phase right now. The widespread clearing of forest (mostly by fire) in the 1880s created a city divorced from ecology, with only tiny pockets of bush and few native animals. People now would be surprised to know that in the early 1990s there were only about a 10 or so breeding pairs of tui around Wellington city. The Remutaka and Tararua Forest Parks were there, but they were a place you travelled to if you wanted to experience wild nature. Now due to the vision of a few people (including Forest & Bird Society) and support from Wellington City Council, we have a situation where that wilderness is now enclosing the city. Eventually it will reach the situation where it will be like the city is within a huge forest, rather than the forest being seperate and far away.
What tracks do you recommend for new people visiting Manawa Karioi?
To start with, walk around Te Ahi Kaa, and stop at the various view-points. Several of these have seats so you can site and take in the view. Once you have done this several times, you will begin to become familiar with how it connects to surrounding roads and reserves. Then start to explore the smaller tracks. Now that we have map boards at all the entry points, there is much less chance that you will get lost!
What do you think makes a successful restoration project?
A combination of things. You have to start with a clear aim. Plan out tracks. Things to consider when doing this include (in no order of importance) what are the best viewpoints? What areas need easy access for planting and for doing control of noxious weeds/pest plants? How can we involve the community as individuals and as existing groups? Establish effective communication with supporters via an email list, a website and social media. Make your working bees fun! They will sometimes involve hard and unpleasant work such as cutting gorse and carrying trays of plants to hard-to-reach spots, so combine those tasks with a bit of planting where you can. Many volunteers think that planting is all that a project involves, and it is certainly the task that people find the most rewarding. We learned that people will turn out in droves to do the planting, but aren't so keen to spend an afternoon cutting tracks through the gorse. By combining the two, we found that people were ok with doing the unpleasant tasks so long as they also got to do some planting too. This makes sense as people will come back to admire the growing forest; no-one comes back to admire the well-cut gorse!
What are your hopes for the future?
To see the project move on to the next phase. Our planting schedule will eventually wind down, but persuing the goal of eradicating mammalian predators will see native wildlife populations explode. As some larger species of birds such as kaka and kakariki need old trees with rotten hollows for nesting, we will need to start installing predator-proof nesting boxes for them so that they can start breeding on site. It will be at least 100 years before some of the podocarps (that's the forest-giant trees such as totara, matai, miro, kahikatea etc) get big enough to start providing suitable nesting sites for those birds.