Bell’s heritage project is a peach

• Author: Sandy Myhre
• Published date: 26 January 2023
• Publication title: Northland Age, The

As it happened, visitors to the show purchased all 30 of the plants, propagated from the historic orchard at Kerikeri’s Edmonds Ruins, within a few hours of the gates opening

The 30 saplings are the first fruits of a COVID project that saw Alex — a keen gardner but not a trained horticulturist — source a variety of seeds and cuttings from different HNZPT properties in Northland.

“Over the last two years, we have been building up a little nursery at Te Waimate Mission to help grow that interest.

“It lets us propagate cuttings and seeds for our own sites to keep the gardens stocked with plants, and there’s a room for propagating interesting things we find along the way,” he said, adding that heritage gardens can be a little strange.

“In some ways, they’re a weird part of our site. The houses are frozen in time, but the gardens keep on growing. The big trees that grace Te Waimate today, for example, didn’t exist in the same way if you were to pick a time like the 1830s,” says Alex.

“There was a period in the 1840s where the missionaries thought the site at Te Waimate was too barren, and so they started a small native tree nursery to help repopulate the property.”

Although the site at Te Waimate is anything but barren today, Alex has revived that tradition of having a small nursery on-site to provide trees with heritage roots to the area and, in the process, some botanic continuity.

Return of the swallows

Anthony Olsen has been playing the organ at Christ Church in Russell for the past five weeks.

Nothing particularly singular about that, except he and his wife, Gaye, represent the advance guard of “swallows” returning to these shores. They are so called because they, and others like them, come each year to the Bay of Islands to rest up over our summer, which is in their northern winter.

COVID and lockdown, however, has put paid to their annual return. There are an estimated 300 swallows who boost Russell’s population of 762 (according to the 2018 Census), but they haven’t been able to return for nearly three years.

“Your Government wouldn’t allow us in,” says Anthony. He has owned a house in Russell since 2005 and couldn’t use it for those three years, but Jersey, on the Channel Islands where he lives, had its own lockdown period as well. From March 2020, restrictions were in place until the end of May 2020, when most were lifted. But New Zealand’s borders remained closed.

All that is behind the swallows now, and they can travel. The Olsens arrived on...