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Strolling along the path through Waterfall Gully in Shakespear Regional Park will lead you past some magnificent puriri trees with their thick trunks reaching up into the forest canopy. Higher up, the branches are laden with ‘widow-makers’ (Collospermum hastatum), a host of ferns, orchids and other plants. This community of plants will provide food and shelter for insects, spiders and other invertebrates, as well as birds. This incredibly complex system took many decades, perhaps centuries, to establish naturally.
In the park, we need more of this habitat, and we are impatient to get it – hence our winter tree planting programme.
There is a famous proverb attributed to the Chinese, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.” If we were prepared to wait many decades, and remove all the grazing animals, the current bush would probably gradually expand into the grass paddocks. But a much quicker route is to do some ‘forest engineering’ by raising seedling trees in our nursery and then planting them out among the grass.
And this is where the community comes in.
Our nursery is currently full of young plants which are ready to go out and park rangers have prepared a wide strip around the southern edge of the existing Waterfall Gully bush where the planting can take place.
This year’s planting days are June 19 and July 17, starting at 10am and finishing at 1pm. The SOSSI team will provide some food after you’ve done your forest engineering.
