Nurseries struggling to keep up with 'extreme' demand for native plants

Friday, 27 August 2021

The demand for native plants is “just insanity”, according to a prominent grower. Where are these all these plants and trees coming from? WILL HARVIE reports.

Eco-Action Nursery Trust​ started out a few years ago as a plan to landscape Christchurch's new Shirley Boys’ High School​ with native vegetation.

Students would learn about biology and horticulture – seeds to seedlings – and then plant them around the school’s new grounds – a nice touch in community building. Meanwhile, the school would get almost-free plants.

​“This is a good idea,” Shirley Boys’ teacher and Eco-Action co-founder Dave Newton thought at the time. There were even some plants left over, which were donated for planting in Ōruapaeroa-Travis Wetland.​

**READ MORE:

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**

He shifted jobs to Christ’s College,​ where the idea was allowed to sprout and over time a main nursery was established there. Seeds collected from Travis Wetland and Pūtaringamotu-Riccarton Bush​ are germinated and later pricked out into larger containers. After about a year, the seedlings are moved to satellite nurseries at other Christchurch schools, where they are potted up and hardened off.

Today this unique programme has native nurseries in 16 Christchurch schools, and aims to have more than 20 next year. The trust grew 14,000 seedlings for planting this year – three times as many as last year – and hopes to mature up to 25,000 plants for next winter.

To complete the cycle, the students and their families, with teacher supervision, plant the seedlings in the residential red zone and environs. The programme has been so successful that there were too many speedings ready for planting this season and Eco-Action drafted in the Department of Corrections to help.

If the trust can keep accelerating, it will have planted 20 to 30 hectares of the Christchurch red zone over about 10 years, Newton says. These are big numbers from a modest idea, but almost every nursery in Canterbury is on a massive growth spurt as demand for natives soars.

Nobody seems to know how many natives have been planted in the province in recent years or how many will be needed in the years ahead, but most nurseries are expanding.

The Christchurch City Council has started to double production at its Harewood nursery, from about 310,000 to 600,000 plants a year. It mostly raises small-grade natives for council green spaces and for donations to community and environmental groups, says Wolfgang Bopp,​ director of Botanic Gardens and Garden Parks. It also dispatched 1700 specimen trees in the last 12 months.

Capacity at the Department of Conservation’s Motukarara Conservation Nursery​ has increased by about a third over the last five years, to about 160,000 plants annually, supervisor Craig Alexander says.​

Stocks in its retail shop are “very low” and customers should phone ahead before visiting. Its main production – supplying plants for big restoration projects in Canterbury – has already been sold for all of 2022.

Meanwhile, commercial growers such as Southern Woods​ have seen demand for natives “growing like crazy” in recent years, says Rico Mannall,​ the business development and marketing manager at the Templeton-based, family-owned nursery. They grow a “couple of million” plants a year – he won’t say how many for commercial reasons, nor how big their expansion has been.

But the company is automating. Covid-permitting, Southern Woods will install​ three machines this year that will greatly lessen the labour needed in the first stage of propagating plants – the most time-consuming and expensive side of plant growing, Mannall says.

Eco-Action solves this cost problem by getting students to propagate plants as volunteers, but the trust still has costs, and received a $60,000 donation from the city council earlier this year.

But students will never compete with the commercial sector. North Auckland-based Kauri Park​ nursery, one of the largest commercial growers in the country, aims to almost double the number of plants it has produced to 200 million by the end of 2026 and 300m by 2030, “as a minimum”.

“Every nurseryman and woman I’ve talked to has really struggled to keep up with New Zealand natives,” Mannall says.

In Canterbury, almost every public and commercial project calls for native landscaping, and most require seeds sourced and raised locally. These projects include the many kilometres of new motorways to the north, south and west of Christchurch, and the city’s big new subdivisions and industrial parks.

Then there’s the ongoing execution of the rebuild blueprint and, one day, the residential red zone in the city’s east. In most instances, these native plantings are supplied by the commercial growers. “Demand isn’t going down, put it that way,” Mannall says.

Farmers are also fencing and planting their waterways. Milk company Synlait​ is now in the nursery business. It has established a 15ha site at its Dunsandel facility and will eventually grow more than 1 million trees and shrubs annually. About 40,000 were planted on Synlait dairy farms in Canterbury this year and the goal is to have 4 million planted by 2028. Ngāi Tahu Farming also has a nursery and wants to plant 1.2 million trees at Te Whenua Hou​ (Eyrewell) by 2030.

Meanwhile, another approach is taken at Trees for Canterbury,​ which recently won permission to lease more council land to expand its operation in Ferrymead. It currently has room for about 150,000 plants on about 15,000 square metres. If consented, the extra 3000sqm will bring production to between 200,000 and 300,000 plants a year, manager Steve Bush says.​

“Demand for plants has been extreme, and I’ve been doing this for 30 years. Nurserymen around the place say it’s just insanity.”

Trees for Canterbury has expanded its staff to nine, and makes use of volunteers and those with disabilities.

They gain new skills and get to “sit there at morning tea time and shoot the breeze, just like their siblings or their parents”, Bush says.

“They get a lot out of it.”

This aspect of Trees for Canterbury means plant production is slowed.

“Because of the people we work with, it takes us longer to pot a plant than a fully organised commercial grower. We have a team … that can plant a 1000 plants a day, whereas we have a volunteer who used to work at a commercial garden, and he could pot about 1000 plants by himself in a day.”

The non-profit donates more than 40,000 plants a year to community planting efforts, including to the Port Hills fire replanting effort. Overall, more than 1 million native trees have been planted as a result of Bush’s efforts, the governor-general said when awarding him a Queen’s Service Medal in August 2020.

Meanwhile, intervening events – the Covid lockdowns – have had big impacts on retail nurseries. The level 3 and 4 lockdowns crashed demand, but customers have since been smashing plants into the ground and the pace has remained sky-high, Bush says.

Like many commercial retailers, Southern Woods was closed during the lockdowns, but ran an online store. Plants were shipped or collected when levels allowed. Mannall thinks online plant shopping will remain an important part of his business even after the pandemic fades.

These nurserymen share more than a love for native vegetation, they also have a sense of pride in their achievements.

It could be sensed when Newton cast his eye over dozens of young people planting natives on the periphery of the red zone earlier this year. Bush almost glowed when talking about the 40,000 kahikatea​ trees he grew for planting in Mairehau.

The commercial grower, Mannall, gets a kick out of seeing his plants growing in places such as Victoria Square, Margaret Mahy Playground and the south frame.

“That's really cool,” he says.