A huge, mass planting project's underway again this spring around the neglected shoreline of a lake in Canterbury.
It's part of a long-term effort to restore native trees and wildlife to Te Waihora / Lake Ellesmere, just outside Christchurch.
Conservation Department planter Pete Owen, who's worked on the project since the start, said the area's been neglected for far too long.
"It was all farmland, pretty much. Retired by the time we got here. Just paddock, after paddock of rank grass — introduced grass, nothing native," he said.
Te Waihora is the largest wetland in the country and it's all hands on deck to get the job done.
"The surrounding wetland margins are the largest piece of conservation land in low laying Canterbury so... if you're going to restore at scale this is the place to do it," Gary Boyd from the Department of Conservation (DOC) said.
The work started five years ago and so far 250,000 native trees and shrubs have been planted around the lake.
"We're set to take that total to 350,000 by June 2024 and we are on track to removing exotic weeds from the Te Waihora margin. There's more work to go but we clear on average 700 hectares of lake margin land annually," Boyd said.
And it's a slick operation.
"We have what we call a train one at the front with the guard gear and next person's got a bundle of mats, next person a bundle of sticks. We lay out roughly 1.5 to 2 metre spacings and once all the gear's down we do a mixture of plants so it's not just a monoculture of just particular species," Owen said.
The landscapes already changed significantly since the work began.
"Just in the last five years that we've been working here we've noticed an increase in native birds but some of the farmers, they've said the same thing. They've been out here some of them their whole lives — 70, 80 years — and they've never seen as many bell birds and such so it's already making a difference," Owen said.
DOC is working with iwi, local landowners, community groups and other agencies on the project.
"For us Te Waihora is not just a lake, it's part of us, it's part of our whakapapa, it's part of our DNA, it's part of our narrative, which defines who we are as a hapu. We see it beyond just being a water body. It is very much part of our identity, so restoring our identity is also restoring our mana, so we're very focussed on restoring the mana and the mauri of Te Waihora," Te Taumutu Rūnanga's Liz Brown said.
And it's already paying off.
"It's a better place for people to use but it's a home now to native birds and animals," Owen said.
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