At the beginning of 2014 I was looking for a meaningful project to get stuck into in all that “free time” I would have when I retired. Wanting to do environmental work, I decided on something very close to home – Laingholm’s enormous weed problem.  At that time, Laingholm was probably the weediest suburb in the weediest city in the world. The large wedge of land at the junction of Warner Park Avenue and Victory Road was especially weedy. Having established that this was “road reserve”, I asked Auckland Transport (AT) to eradicate the invasive weeds.  And I kept asking them – for four years. I even narrowed it down to just one weed – ginger. Eventually, Fulton Hogan (AT’s contractor) rang to advise me that AT “did not have the appetite” to tackle these weeds.  I was so angry!  A day or so later, walking past the site with friend Trish, I said to her, “I feel like doing it myself”. I was amazed when she said, “I’ll help you.” We agreed to work for an hour every Friday afternoon (weather permitting) cutting and pasting ginger.  We began on 28th April 2018.

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For eighteen months, we worked without AT’s knowledge.  We had no idea the ginger was as bad as it was, but were determined to do the best job we could to enable native species to regenerate and produce a network of roots to hold this unstable slope, which has a history of slipping.  When I did decide to tell AT what we had been doing, an engineer came to inspect the site.  He was not a New Zealander and admitted to knowing nothing about trees! He was convinced that, without the ginger roots to hold the soil, there would be a slip, the road would collapse and that would be very expensive!  In vain, I tried to explain that ginger, with its shallow roots that form a raft, makes erosion more likely not less. I showed him a site further down the road where ginger had been part of a significant slip. With the help of Ellice Protheroe, of Environmental Services, we completed the necessary paperwork, risk management plan etc and AT gave us permission to continue our work – one of just two areas of road reserve in the Waitakere Ranges Local Board area where permission has been granted for volunteers to work on road reserves. Since that visit, no AT engineer has ever been back to check on our progress. There was no significant slip there in January 2023 during the Auckland Anniversary weekend floods nor during Cyclone Gabrielle.

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Trish and I continue to cut and paste the ginger, depending on our availability and the weather.  Looking back over our efforts, even we are staggered by what we have achieved. Every so often we put away the loppers and use secateurs to cut and paste the regrowth. Meanwhile, others have dealt to the other weeds and have also planted natives in the gaps. There are seeds in the ground and more seeds are being brought in by birds, so the native bush is regenerating nicely. At the top of Warner Park Avenue, there was no ginger but plenty of other weeds, especially kikuyu. That area is also being transformed by the efforts of members of Restoration Ruatuna. When Trish and I began this ginger eradication project our aims were to get rid of the ginger and encourage and inspire others to tackle weeds on their properties by demonstrating what one or two people can do with a little determination and effort.