Environmental Studies students are digging in to create a Māori garden that will use traditional methods to grow pre-colonisation foods, medicines and other crops.
The garden on Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi’s Tamaki Makaurau site will be designed according to customary planting schedules, using pre-European practices combined with contemporary techniques and materials. It will replicate ancient horticultural practices such as soil amendments with ash, sand and gravel, stone-mulched mounds and cultivated soil heaps.
The project came about after Environment Studies lecturer Phil Ross asked for a patch of ground at the campus which the wānanga shares with Unitec in Carrington Road.
“The idea was to use a garden for teaching aspects of soil science, restoration ecology, plant physiology – in effect, to have a hands-on teaching area for students of the Bachelor of Environment Studies programme,” Mr Ross said.
“The students bought into the concept. They wanted the garden to be created in a traditional manner, and they started researching pre-European horticultural methods. The project has been pretty much student-led since then.”
Awanuiārangi has access to seven varieties of kumara that existed in New Zealand before European colonisation.
“Using information from student research into traditional Māori horticultural knowledge, we sprouted the kumara in tapapa beds, which are constructed by mounding up layers of fern, sand, crushed shell, soil and ash. The kumara sprouted like wild, and are now acclimatising to the outside environment.”
Working bees of students and other volunteers began clearing the 10m by 15m area in mid-November and were expecting to begin planting kumara this week.
The Environment Studies team is part of a group that has expressed an interest in using all or part of a 12,400-square-metre area of the Albany campus, previously used as a horticultural area and including several buildings, greenhouses, shade houses, and existing cultivated and landscaped areas. Other interested parties include the Natural Sciences and the Landscape Architecture faculties at Unitec, the Manukau Institute of Technology’s horticulture department, the Open Polytechnic and the New Zealand Beekeepers’ Association. A steering group has been formed to develop various concepts for the land’s use.
