District reserves featured

TWO environmentally important Manawatu District locations – Kitchener Park and Kimbolton Scenic Reserve – feature in a newly released publication on the love affair many New Zealanders enjoy with native plants.

“Living with Natives”, edited by Ian Spellerberg and Michele Frey, with photographs by John Maillard, is a collection of 44 personal narratives from a wide range of New Zealanders who enjoy the beauty, tranquillity and satisfaction of working with native plants.

Kitchener Park Curator, Gavin Scott, and Kimbolton School are delighted that their environmental projects were selected for the book, which was launched in Christchurch earlier this month.

Mr Scott said the project at Kitchener Park, a 13-hectare native bush reserve near Feilding, had been well presented, underlining the park’s importance in the environmental landscape as well as detailing his own involvement and those of some of the workers.

“There is no place for complacency in reforestation because every piece of native bush we can save is unique and provides a corridor for birds,” Mr Scott said in his chapter. “This is essential in Manawatu, where there is so little forest left.”

Kimbolton School’s narrative traces the progress and achievements of the school’s Green Team after it adopted the town’s scenic reserve as an outdoor classroom a few years ago.

The project, involving maintenance and upkeep, weed-busting, sycamore eradication and replanting, has enabled pupils to learn about the bush and practice their growing environmental awareness and ethics.

Nine members of the team, and teacher Anwyl Minnar, provide their own contributions and outline the responsibilities undertaken in caring for this isolated area of bush that contains an 800-year-old rata and a 400-year-old rimu.

Ms Minnar said the sense of ownership the children had assumed in the forest was heartening and “they take it personally if something has happened, whether it is through human influence or an act of nature”.

A number of other Manawatu people are included in the publication including Adi Leng, of Environment Network Manawatu; Ken Pratt, Ashhurst Domain Caretaker; Black Cap cricketer, Mathew Sinclair; former Palmerston North Mayor, Heather Tanguay; Michael Greenwood, who’s involved with Keebles Bush, and Chris Thomasen, of Forest & Bird.