Perhaps it was naivety, but when moving to the country from the biggest city in Aoteaora/New Zealand I assumed that the lack of people meant there’d be more nature. Well, I was wrong. There wasn’t more nature - there was just more agriculture.
Which is fine… I mean, we need farming to eat and to export. I quite like going to the supermarket and being able to pick from a range of fruit and vegetables! But being surrounded on all four sides by agricultural land was a shock to the system. There are pockets of nature reserves and plantings, like Tavora Reserve just south of us, but they really have to be sought out. My solution was to plant my own miniature ngāhere (forest).
So the very first iteration of our garden design had a quarter of the land set aside for native tree planting. Those plans changed, as plans do, first moving the ngāhere to another section of the garden (and reducing in size) and then movin…
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