Community garden digging in for future

Kelmarna Gardens in the Auckland suburb of Herne Bay has been in operation since 1981. Photo / Nick Reed

Facility faces change as long-term partnership ends

It's hard to believe, as you walk around the Kelmarna Gardens, that the busy thoroughfares of Jervois and Richmond Roads are metres away. There are sweet-smelling piles of compost being forked into wheelbarrows, chickens scratching away in their coop, cows in the paddock at the bottom of the gardens.

Wonky hand-painted signs mark out the vege beds of long-term community gardeners, former clients of Framework, a community mental health and intellectual disability service which pulled out of running the gardens in February this year. A volunteer mum weeds a patch ready for planting, her two girls squealing as they collect eggs and run around the gardens.

As he talks to the Herald, garden manager Adrian Roche doesn't stop his work, weeding, sorting out clients to dig over the potato beds and plant new seed spuds, dispatching the girls with their eggs to the kitchen for the shared lunch, marking off new seedlings with bamboo and string fences.

"When Framework pulled out, they'd been here a bloody long time. It was a strategic response for their government contract, they needed to fulfil their contract in different ways," says Mr Roche. "That whole NGO [non-government organisations] market, they come into it with good vision, but then they have to behave like corporates. The healthcare model makes that happen."

Suddenly, the Kelmarna Gardens Trust, who had basically been hands-off landlords on behalf of Auckland Council to Framework since 1992 were thrust into actively deciding the fate of the land and the work. Trust chairwoman Dr Mary Paul, who had been helping out on the board since the 1990s, was left with only one of her eight board members. She admits she'd only been there for long-time secretary Joy Foote who had "tirelessly kept the gardens going since 1981. I was terrified".

She and Michael Graham-Stewart have rebuilt the trust with skilled lawyers, fundraisers, business people and folk connected to the mental health community. There's an active social media community - some 800 likers on Facebook - volunteers from the neighbourhood turn up to monthly weekend working bees and around a dozen of the Framework clients have stayed on as workers. Last weekend's spring festival had more than 800 visitors through the gates, drawn by offers of a hangi from Orphans Kitchen, workshops and a nature trail.

"It was lovely seeing so many people, we should make it a regular thing," says Dr Paul. "We are more volunteer based, some are gardening at the weekends. We don't want to go to a formal allotment system as we want to think of this as a community garden, a therapeutic garden."

Mr Roche agrees. He is the only paid staff member left now, beginning at the garden first as a volunteer in the 1990s, then on staff for 12 years.

"The gardens had always had that focus on training, first with the PEP [government employment] schemes, then with the therapeutic aims," says Mr Roche. "But Framework pulling out could possibly be a good thing, things can get tired after 23 years. There is no point fighting it, they closed the sister garden in Devonport in 2012. The community was disengaged, some people were not okay or scared of having people with mental health issues. And new clients may not have been coming along - only the other day I was talking to a GP in Grey Lynn and he'd never heard about us. We weren't networked with other mental health services."

Now this place that straddles old Grey Lynn and gentrified Herne Bay is reaching out to its wealthy neighbours. Dr Paul's committee have briefed a landscaper specialising in community spaces to give the gardens their first makeover in decades and are soliciting for "garden angels", 10 to 20 people who can commit $5 to $10,000 for the three-year plan. A bit of money comes in from selling veges, but nothing like the $352,000 needed to fund staff and services.