by Geoffrey Churchman

Eva and I have reported on these since 2016 and this year was the 30th anniversary of this annual Lions Club event. The number of gardens was thus boosted from the usual dozen to 16 although one at the beach was cancelled ‘due to illness’ and the two retirement village ones are probably already familiar to many people. Nga Manu was again included and their usual admission charge gave you all the other gardens as a bonus.

The club’s objective is to provide a mix of big and compact, and bush to beach settings and that’s what you got.

The weather forecast wasn’t encouraging but in the event, ‘sky juice’ was limited to a few showers on the Saturday.

One trend that’s clear is the increased amount of space allocated to growing vegetables, some in hothouses.

The garden which I found most interesting was actually a forest regeneration project on 4.5 acres or 18,000 sq metres south of the River and just east of the Ewy near the Mazengarb Stream of rather boggy land. On this the owners have planted quite a few native trees like rimu, totara, kahikatea, cedar, manuka and kauri.

The lady told me that if you have land that is subject to flooding from ‘Dougherty’s Precious Water’, then only plant kahikatea as it will cope fine with being submerged — other species won’t.

She also mentioned the problem of kauri dieback of forests in the Northland region — the spors that cause it are carried by wild pigs and not much can be done to stop that. However, if people walk through a seawater trough before entering the forests it will kill the spors.

We will post more pics of other Waikanae gardens over the next few days.