Haehaeata Natural Heritage Trust needs to plant 5,500 plants at the Half Mile Recreation Reserve at Alexandra, nursery manager Rachael Baxter says.

Five thousand of those would be grasses, but it was still a tall order and an exciting one, Rachael said.

Haehaeata and The Central Otago District Council (CODC) had reached a Memorandum of Understanding to plant and redevelop the reserve, the CODC announced yesterday. The council removed wilding pines on about 14ha on the reserve earlier this year, raising temperatures for and against the cull, including last-minute legal manoeuvres.

The MOU allows the Clyde-based Haehaeata trust to source, propagate and plant out over a five-year period.

“It is exciting,” Rachael said of the partnership.

“We are looking forward to it.”

Nursery manager Rachael Baxter teaches Clyde School pupils about tree species in May of this year, during a planting session near the Miners Lane playground. 

The timing was perfect for the trust as it  was running out of planting sites on its flagship revegetation project at Flat Top Hill Conservation Area.

The site is a recognised lizard and gecko habitat and the reserve has several historical sites within it that link back to the gold mining days of the area. These would be protected and their history highlighted during the redevelopment.

The council would hand over the replanting of the reserve to Haehaeata to enable it to undertake the required work and would continue to work in collaboration in providing infrastructure such as water, signage, pest control, including herbicide and rabbit proof fenced plots, promotional information and other materials as required, such as mulch, stakes, guards, compost and fertiliser.

CODC group manager community experience David Scoones said he looked forward to seeing the partnership flourish.

“Originally, Council had budgeted (assuming it would have to be a commercial arrangement) for about 4000 plantings in total on this reserve. However, working with Haehaeata, we will be planting this number in the first year and about the same every year after that for five years. 

“Each year we will review our progress together and depending on how we are tracking, the number of plantings could increase again,” David said.

Rachael said the trust hoped to establish a dryland planting.

“We think that it is going to be a wonderful opportunity for people to see some of our native drylands species,” she said.

Plants would not be a problem, Rachael said, although blackbirds had “really made a mess” of some of the younger seedlings. Community plantings at Flat Top have become a regular event in the lives of many locals and she hoped to see the same when the time was right for planting.

“We are hoping to recruit lots of people from the community to help put them in the ground.”

Neighbour Ken Churchill was against the wilding pine removal and said the proposed planting by Haehaeata was a great move, but the council had let the community down by not removing slash and wood chip.

“The lizard report said clearly that the slash and chip needed to be removed as it provides shelter for predators,” he said.

“None of this provides any shelter whatsoever.

“They have effectively taken away the use of that place at the moment, because it’s full of slash.”

Ken said with the El Nino effect, the reserve and the slash there it would be tinder dry.

“Already, in the last big blow we had about a week ago, with the loss of the shelter belt, two big trees have come down in the neighbourhood.”

The following planting programme has been agreed, with the CODC assuming maintenance of the reserve plantings three years after any section has been completed.

Haehaeata Natural Heritage Trust would plant: 

• the first tranche of 500 plants (shrub and tree mix) and 5,000 grasses in Autumn/Winter 2024;
• a second tranche of 750 plants (shrub and tree mix) in Autumn/Winter 2025;
• a third tranche of 1,000 plants (shrub and tree mix) in Autumn/Winter 2026;
• a fourth tranche of 1,000 plants (shrub and tree mix) in Autumn/Winter 2027; and 
• the fifth tranche of 1,000 plants (shrub and tree mix) in Autumn/Winter 2028.