Having been providing our chemical-free garden restoration services for 6 months now, we have been delighted to experience a range of outdoor environments, advised gardeners and non-gardeners alike on our unique methodology, and seen them enjoy the results.
Some have been short-term restorations, recovering a well-planned garden from just a few years of weed invasion.
Others are long-term projects, creating the conditions for the desired plants to succeed, and for easy weed control in the future.
If you are finding your garden hard to manage, through lack of time or difficult conditions, we offer a thorough site assessment in which we will listen to your needs and wishes, with identification of both weeds and any unrecognised free, wild and low maintenance plants… including hidden gems like the native tree seedlings, kahikatea and tanekaha, discovered this week and seen below:
While shade is vital to the health of shade-loving plants and habitat, and can be life-saving in summer, there is no need to suffer the loss of light where unwanted weed masses have shut out the sun.
This is often the case with fast-growing trees like monkey apple, privet, tree privet and wattle, and vine weeds such as honeysuckle, pink jasmine, ivy and moth plant.
Where these weeds are among wanted trees and shrubs, the careful identification and removal of the weeds can open the area to gentle sunlight filtered through a leafy canopy, which will benefit from the winter light and fill out, so that no light has been lost by the time summer comes.
Where there is no wanted tall vegetation, removal of tall weeds will open the space to sun, so that a new, manageable ground cover or shrubbery can be established.
– assessment of your situation, with identification of weeds and also of any native plants, including native vines such as kaihua (NZ native “jasmine”), puawhananga (NZ native Clematis), kohia (NZ native passionfruit vine), karaeo (supplejack), tataramoa (Bush lawyer) – as these can be attractive, easily controllable additions to your natural areas, as well as food sources for kereru and tui in winter.
– advice or action on releasing your site from weeds and, if wanted, turning them into compost and mulch during winter, to keep soil moist in summer and help suppress future weed invasions.
The spelling … north shore wilds … is easy, but remember, if you have to type it into a search, it’s “wilds”…plural… and why, you ask?
Well, we are not proposing that the entire North Shore should be wild… (living in trees can be inconvenient)… just that our locally native species and the character of our local wild nature are conserved, recognised and enjoyed, and given a place in our gardens where possible.
“Wilds” is a term used informally to cover plants whose ancestry is entirely wild; ie they grew wild from wild parent plants, or were cultivated from seed collected from known wild plants in the ecological area in which they are to be planted…ie they are “ecosourced”.
We have been weeding to release the remnants of wild native plant communities in North Shore reserves and gardens since 1987, and ecosourcing seeds locally since 2003. We also pot up some of the wild native seedlings descended from the ecosourced trees, shrubs and groundcovers planted in our own garden, or brought by birds to our garden, which is on the edge of Eskdale Forest.
So, whether weeding, landscaping or growing plants in pots, we work only with “North Shore wilds”; plants with the genetic characteristics that evolved to make them perfect for their North Shore situation.
Our new landscape gardening business takes its name from the little plant nursery we operated commercially from about 2003 to 2006, ecosourcing only from the North Shore and selling mainly to North Shore City Council for local environmental restoration projects.
The wild native trees, sedges and grasses around the nursery never stopped reproducing, so we pot some up every year, giving them away or planting a few in our Gahnia Grove restoration project.
We are now once again growing a small range of ecosourced native plants for sale to our restoration and landscaping customers.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos on this website were taken by us on the North Shore of Auckland, mostly in the suburbs of Birkenhead/Birkdale/Hillcrest/Glenfield/Northcote, during our volunteer or commercial work or at our home in Glenfield.
Above: This pink flower is kotukutuku / NZ native tree fuchsia /Fuchsia excorticata, on an old tree which has overhung Kaipatiki Stream in Glenfield for several decades, (photo 2018 by Jacqui Geuz, iNaturalist.nz.org).
