The 30-year story of turning an urban wasteland into a thriving forest.
If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise - and it won’t be bears.
Back in the early 1990s, a treeless grassland site in Masterton with streams and wetlands had little commercial value, but today it’s been turned into a native forest wonderland.
Local resident and Masterton South Rotary Club member Warwick Dean remembers it well: “It was just, a swampy ground with cattle grazing, weeds growing everywhere, full of blackberry and rubbish.”
The original site of the Millenium Native Forest Reserve.
Dean decided to make an offer to its owners, The Masterton Trust Lands Trust, to create a forest reserve planted with native Aotearoa tree species.
Tree planting began by Rotary members and volunteers in 1998, with local farmers using tractors to bore holes and local school children planting the young saplings.
“Plants and seedlings were obtained locally from private residencies and Mount Holdsworth and then propagated in our own sheds,” said Dean.
For the past two decades, local community volunteers have maintained and developed the reserve, including using its own boat to clear the weeds and ivy from the islands on the lakes.
The Millenium Native Forest Reserve inter island ferry.
A driving force behind the army of volunteers is Christine McDonald.
“It’s fresh, it’s peaceful and the people who come through here are happy to be out in the open. You hear the birds, you feel gentle breezes rather than strong winds. It’s my happy place.”
Maintaining the reserve involves a variety of tasks, including sustaining the 1.8km of tracks that criss-cross the area.
“We developed the tracks so you would never really go in a straight line, getting new vistas and seeing new clumps of trees and different species. You don’t actually know that there’s someone just five or ten metres through the bush on another track,” said McDonald.
Aerial of the reserve.
The journey to create Masterton’s lush native forest without wind protection on open land from when it first started has not been without problems for McDonald and the team.
“A lot of natives don’t like growing under established trees. So the first few years they lost almost everything they planted, there was a huge die-off.”
Going back to the drawing board, quick-growing lucerne trees were planted to give shelter. These were then cut back once the native trees reached around three metres.
“We’re trying to showcase what the natural cover of the Wairarapa would have been before we came and cleared it all,” explained McDonald.
“Developing something like this will enable a far greater range of people to come through and get that sense of just how majestic the native vegetation is.”
With thousands of trees, shrubs, ferns and grasses planted over nearly 30 years, the reserve is now at a point where it has started to regenerate itself. Native birds are now finding their place and a flurry of invertebrates, eels and skinks are making it home.
From its visionary concept, Warwick Dean hopes more people will come and enjoy the forest: “It’s an asset, a jewel in the crown people don’t realise is here, it just gives me pride what it is and what it could be.”
