To help nature flourish in the city, Auckland is going green

“Like this: hold them by the leaves, tease apart the roots,” Adrian Roche, manager of Kelmarna Gardens, a city farm and organic community garden in Auckland, tells Sesha Manuguri, who is bent over a clump of basil shoots, each of which have sprouted a pair of leaves the size of sesame seeds.

Manuguri is untangling the plants so he can replant them with more room to grow, and it is fiddly work. He has never done this before. In fact, he’s only been here for five minutes.

“It was her idea,” he laughs, pointing over at his companion, Suma Raj. “She dragged me here.”

Far from being full-time gardeners, the pair are students at the nearby University of Auckland. Both are glad for an escape from the lab.

A hill of assymetric plots

It’s mid-afternoon on a Monday, the sun is peeping out from behind the clouds, and a brisk, warm northerly breeze sweeps across the gardens, redolent with scent.

Raj starts to settle the seedlings into the soil of the planter tray. “You should fit about five across and six down,” says Roche, before disappearing into the nearby greenhouse to look for a watering can.

Around us, the garden spills down the hill in a quilt of asymmetric plots.

Bamboo frames stand tall waiting for runner beans to climb them, cabbages are just beginning to unfurl, the magenta roots of radishes are showing through the soil and big stands of rosemary, borage and Vietnamese mint sway in the wind.

The rhubarb and silverbeet look ready for picking. Flowers in a riot of colors spill over the edges of the plots – alyssum, lobelia and pansies turning their purple faces to the sun.

It’s about two things: education and therapy

People turn up at Kelmarna Gardens for all kinds of reasons. Roche arrived one day two decades ago and never really left – now he’s the one permanent fixture in a shifting array of volunteers that offer their time to help tend to the plots.

Raj, a soil scientist, wants to learn how to grow food organically. After she completes her PhD, she plans to return to her hometown of Bangalore in India, where she’ll start her own garden.

Kelmarna Gardens is tucked away in Herne Bay, a suburb adjacent to Auckland’s central business district. Its entrance, on an ordinary residential street, is marked only by a hand-painted sign advertising produce for sale.

But follow the gravel driveway down the hill, between the weatherboard suburban houses, and the sounds of the city fades.

Slowly, it’s replaced by the rustle of wind through the banana palms, the low hum of bees and the whooping of children racing between the plots.

We wanted to have a place that supported people. There are people in this world that – for whatever reason – need some support, and there are less and less things around for that

“It’s about two things: education and therapy,” Roche says about Kelmarna Gardens’ mission.

“We wanted to have a place that supported people. There are people in this world that – for whatever reason – need some support, and there are less and less things around for that. Gardening’s good for you: it gives you meaning, as well as access to and education around healthy food,” he adds.

Other than stressing that many people turn to gardening as a form of therapy, Roche reveals to me that Japanese culture recognizes the benefits of being in nature, deeming the effect as “forest bathing”. “It’s the same deal here, really,” he says. “It’s vegetable-garden bathing!”

A shortcut to social unity

Roche is far from the only person to recognize the positive, community-building effects that gardening can bring to a city.

Now, activists and city officials have seized on it as a shortcut to social unity.

In a city that is experiencing record migration – 72,000 new Aucklanders have arrived in 2016 alone, making it the fourth-most diverse city in the world – gardening is more than a skillset or a source of food. It’s a way of bringing people together.

Indeed, at a number of “teaching gardens” in south Auckland – which can be found at parks like Centre Park, Middlemore Park, Stadium Reserve, East Tamaki Reserve and Feasegate Park, among others – high school students, new migrants and refugees are paired with skilled gardeners to learn how to grow their own produce.

What’s more, the Auckland Botanic Gardens includes a demonstration edible garden that displays heritage plants and unusual varieties – like a library of plants for prospective gardeners to browse – and holds workshops for the public to get up-close and personal with these plants throughout the year.

An unusual abundance of trees

Meanwhile, on many of the city’s front lawns, garden infrastructure is already in place – locals just need to be shown how to use it.

Auckland has an unusual abundance of fruit trees, which were planted enthusiastically by early settlers to the area.

Depending on the time of year, a wander through the city’s suburban streets reveal trees sagging under the weight of grapefruit, lemons, oranges, plums, pears or feijoas.

Back in the day, everybody had a lemon or grapefruit tree, and because citrus grows so well in Auckland – most of the fruit just produces itself

“Back in the day, everybody had a lemon or grapefruit tree, and because citrus grows so well in Auckland – most of the fruit just produces itself.

We wanted to have a place that supported people. There are people in this world that – for whatever reason – need some support, and there are less and less things around for that says non-profit manager Di Celliers.

Concerned that much of this backyard bounty was going to waste, Celliers started Community Fruit Harvesting.

Under the umbrella of this organization, she mobilizes a small army of volunteers to collect surplus fruit and donate it to people in need via food banks and other charities spread out across the city.

Who’s interested in fruit-picking in this day and age? “Any age group, any gender, any ethnicity, a lot of foreigners who are new to the country, stay-at-home moms, students and young people,” Celliers says. “People who might be a bit lonely, especially those who are new to the area.”

Fruit-tree owners register with Community Fruit Harvesting, and “picks” can range from a single tree to entire orchards on city-fringe properties, many of them planted two or three generations earlier.

“We do make a community thing of it,” Celliers says. “You meet people, you’re out in the fresh air, you can take your family and your kids. We never go for more than an hour and a half to two hours, tops.”

After four years of operation, Community Fruit Harvesting has a significant turnover – the winter of 2017 – citrus season – was its busiest yet.

In 2016, it orchestrated 407 fruit gathering excursions, resulting in about 35,000 kilograms of produce being redistributed.

Celliers also teaches preserving techniques, so jams, marmalades and cordials made from various fruits are donated, too.

Let them eat feijoa

Fewer fruit trees grow on public land as compared private land, but there are increasing calls for more.

For instance, community activist Mik Smellie organized the planting of a “feijoa forest” on a scrap of public land downtown, based on his conviction that free feijoas are an integral part of Auckland culture.

If Auckland had a mascot fruit, it would undoubtedly be this green, egg-sized, guava-like fruit with a short but extremely intense season each spring, prompting a city-wide feast across March and April.

Recipes are traded and café menus altered, and those with feijoa trees regularly give bags of fruit away to family members and colleagues.

All the trees are located in the suburbs, but now, when the feijoa forest reaches maturity, passersby will be able to collect fruit downtown.

Lunch time gardening

The built-up city center is the last place for the community-garden movement to reach. Gardening in suburbia makes sense; gardening between high-rises less so.

But artist Sarah Smuts-Kennedy is on a mission to change that by providing opportunities for office workers to get their hands dirty during their lunch breaks.

On Wellesley Street West, surrounded by a myriad of skyscrapers, is one of her projects, Griffiths Gardens, a collection of planter boxes filled with seedlings, a shed with tools and picnic tables for people to stop and rest.

Gardening workshops are held here once a week. On a bench, there’s a row of lettuce and mint seedlings in small paper cups. “Take me home,” encourages a sign. So I do.

Carrying my lettuce down Queen Street, I’m surprised at the immediate change in the people I encounter leaving Griffiths Gardens – they’re stifling smiles.

This is exactly the effect Smuts-Kennedy was hoping to achieve. Griffiths Gardens, she says, is a “social sculpture” – one that I’m now shaping – and an offshoot another one of her projects.

For the Love of Bees, a city-wide initiative, consists of hives placed in Myers Park and Victoria Park in the central business district, bringing 5,000 bees to the heart of the city center.

“Social sculpture gives us a framework for thinking about problems,” Smuts-Kennedy says.

“For the Love of Bees invites Aucklanders to imagine Auckland as the safest city in the world for bees, and it creates infrastructure for those community members to learn about what that even means – whether it’s beekeeping or learning how to grow plants that don’t need to be sprayed with things that are detrimental to bees. It means that we’re creating something.” she adds.

Smuts-Kennedy’s work prompts a shift in thinking, a way of seeing the environment as more than incidental or decorative – instead, as an entire functioning system, like a subway network underlying the city.

Native butterflies, like the copper butterfly and the blues and the ringlets and the admirals, all are rare now because there isn’t much habitat for them… we’re trying to create those habitats

Creating a pollinator highway

Ensuring that ecosystem continues to hum along nicely is the preoccupation of landscape architect Andrea Reid, who spends her spare time creating corridors of pollinator-friendly plants across the city.

Most people recognize bees as pollinators, she says, but just as invaluable are butterflies, lizards, moths and other insects – and it’s important for the city’s gardens that they travel back and forth.

“Native butterflies, like the copper butterfly and the blues and the ringlets and the admirals, all are rare now because there isn’t much habitat for them,” she says. “We’re trying to create those habitats.”

Reid’s first Pollinator Pathway is a series of parks stretching across the city, from Coxs Bay in the west to Grey Lynn Park in the center.

The middle section of the corridor didn’t have a lot to offer pollinators, until Reid set her sights on a small triangle of public land, Hakanoa Reserve.

Auckland’s park land is usually kept to close-cropped grass, but after much persistence, Reid obtained council permission to transform the reserve into a riot of flowering plants: kowhai and cabbage trees to draw birds, swan plants for butterflies, clover and lobelia for bees.

The finishing touch: two wooden boxes, home for 200 bumblebees.

The project is as much about education as it is about ecosystems.

What delights Reid most is seeing people who are afraid of bees or other insects relax once they’ve had the opportunity to look at them up close.

“There are a lot of things that people hate on without knowing they are doing something productive – flies, caterpillars, wasps,” she says.

Many of these pollinators, she hopes, will travel along the pathway to Kelmarna Gardens at the western end – where, late in the afternoon, I can hear the gentle humming of them at work.

I’m meant to continue with my day, but I find myself settling down on one of the garden benches to watch a bee drift around the borage.

The sun comes out, and a buttery-gold haze hangs low over the garden.

Roche wanders past, and when I say I might sit a while longer – soaking up the garden bath – he laughs. “Stay all day, I always tell people,” he says. “Stay all day.”