Letter From New Zealand #6

My friend Peter Huck, journalist and windswept adventurer, recently moved away from Los Angeles with his other half, the lovely Barbara Drake, to beautiful New Zealand. They are living in a tiny apartment in Auckland with a very, very small kitchen. Since their excellent and mostly vegetarian dinner parties were such a feature of my social life here, and sadly missed, I asked Peter to think about writing a monthly letter from down under as a kind of mirror to my own efforts and experiences here. This is the sixth letter.

One of the pluses that New Zealand boasts, from a carbon capture perspective, are its forests, which cover 7.5 million hectares, or almost 30% of the land area. We've spent the past week up on Two Caravan Hill, our Coromandel property, working with a local team to add a few hundred native trees to the national total, countering some of our carbon emissions as well as restoring biodiversity. After several days of heavy rain - up to 10 inches in one deluge that precipitated huge mudslides on the twisting road over the steep Coromandel Range to our east - we struck a dry window of clear, still, warm days, and bone-chillingly cold nights with temperatures near freezing, that made clamoring up steep banks (sometimes chain-sawing giant gorse plants to gain access) a little easier and less uncomfortable.

Having sourced our plants – native species that included totora, rewarewa, puriri, matai, pohutukawa, hebe, pittosporum, flax, ti kouka, akeake, karaka, kowhai, tanekaha, horoeka and nikau to give them their Maori names - from local nurseries and Project Crimson, a national group which supplies free plants, we stockpiled compost, mulch and stakes around the property and got stuck in .

The crucial thing when attempting to reconstruct a forest is where you plant. Thus certain trees – the rewarewa and totara for instance – like free-draining areas and work on slopes. Others, including many grasses – planted as part of our ongoing stream restoration - and the cabbage trees, can tolerate wet feet. Indeed, cabbage trees would seem to grow anywhere: I’ve seen them on high slopes in dry limestone country in Hawke’s Bay. Others, like karaka, handle wind, no mean consideration on Two Caravan Hill, where gusts routinely box the compass. Soft-leafed plants, pace the puriri, do best with some cover. We solicited advice from experts, walking around the landscape to site specimens, and frequently consulted books as we tried to imagine what plants would look like in three, five, ten or twenty years. Podocarps like matai, totora or kauri (which we’ll plant later) live for centuries. The trick is not to give into temptation and overplant, although in severe wind areas we massed fast growers like pittosporums to break up gusts.

This was our second large-scale planting – Barbara was in charge of the first last August, when it rained – and we’re starting to see more bird life (attracted by plants that provide food in the form of berries). Fantails fluttered around as we spread mulch, they often follow people as we disturb insects when brushing through bush; California quail burst from cover when we approached; tuis, famous for their repertoire of grunts, coughs and chortles, sang nearby, as did bellbirds and one afternoon I watched a kahu, or hawk, ghost silently over the tree fern glade beneath our bach, using its wings to back and hover, as it searched for prey. I didn’t hear the morepork this time.



Now we're back in Auckland, nursing sore backs and hands and nervously monitoring Metservice, the national weather forecaster, hoping for imminent rain that will bed the plants in. In the back of our minds is a replay of last summer's drought, so it's crucial the plants get their roots down fast.

Reforestation, restocking denuded areas with native species - hacked down for timber in the 19th century and thereafter kept down [although it's likely the soil holds seedlings] by intensive pastoralism and fires to encourage grass growth for stock - is a growing trend here. I'm hoping to visit one of the North Island's signature sheep stations, Young Nick's Head - the kiwi equivalent of Plymouth Rock for Pakehas, or whites, in that it was the first point spotted by Captain James Cook on his epic circumnavigation in 1769 - which was sold to an American, John Griffin, in 2002, creating controversy here [the sale of New Zealand land to foreigners has aroused varying degrees of concern and xenophobia]. The 1,680-acre property is being landscaped by a New York firm, Nelson, Byrd and Woltz, who have planted 250,000 native trees, dwarfing our efforts.

I heard about this venture at a LA Mindshare event where I meet David de Rothschild - the British environmental activist now closing in on Australia aboard the Plastiki, a catamaran made from plastic bottles, in a trans-Pacific voyage to raise awareness about plastic pollution on marine food chains - and plan to hook up with Thomas Woltz in New York later this year. Hopefully, I’ll get to visit Young Nick’s Head and another Nelson, Byrd and Woltz project at Eastwoodhill, New Zealand’s National Arboretum, described by Thomas as a “Noah’s Ark of trees from around the world” and a vital flora repository at a crucial ecological moment, dominated by species extinction, in our planet’s history.

Alas, tree planting has pushed cuisine onto the back burner, as we made do with pre-dawn porridge, soups – pre-cooked in Auckland – and kiwi Pinot Noirs [it wasn’t all hard yakka]. The highlight was probably a meal of fish and chips from the Coromandel chippie. I choose Tarakihi, fresh and locally caught, which perfectly matched the light, non-greasy potato chips [a.k.a. French fries], doused with Apple Cider Vinegar, sprinkled with ground sea salt and wolfed down straight from the newspaper wrapping. Protein and carbohydrate - instant planting fuel. Delicious.

©2010 Peter Huck