Planting

This year’s public planting days will be on: Sunday 8 June, Saturday 21 June, and Sunday 13 July. 

Since Shakespear was opened as a regional park in 1972, hundreds of thousands of trees have been planted by staff and volunteers. Gullies have been fenced off to allow bush to regenerate, paddocks have been retired and a major restoration of the Okoromai wetland has been completed.

Next comes the daylighting of the Waterfall Gully stream where it reaches the sea at Okoromai Bay. The stream will be restored back to its original location. There will be extensive restoration planting along the stream banks and a bridge so people can cross the stream.

A new nursery was built in 2019 and is operated by a team of volunteers every Tuesday. The jobs vary from seed collecting and cleaning, seed setting, pricking out and potting up, weeding and cleaning/recycling our equipment and some planting out.

All seed trays and young seedlings are hand watered every two to three days to monitor moisture levels, though there is a full automatic watering system for all plants. The nursery has a covered seed raising area, an outdoor shade cloth sheltered area for newly potted plants and a large outside area for growing on plants till winter planting days.

A total of 24,000 trees and shrubs were planted in 2024 in several different areas, always adjacent to existing areas of bush. That brought our total of trees and shrubs planted since 2012 to over 200,000. That is in addition to all the trees planted before 2012.

The pace of revegetation is about to increase dramatically with a plan to plant 38 ha in 2025 at Shakespear. This will be a mitigation planting to offset the environmental damage done by the construction of the new O Mahurangi Penlink road. The contract is for six years to include post-planting care and replacement where needed.