Date: 7th February 2025
A forest of 22,000 native trees is now taking root next to the Countryside Trail, thanks to support from the Hilton Global Foundation.
Since the trust was formally established in 2015, we’ve focused on small changes to public spaces, adding pockets of native biodiversity each spring and autumn. Through the dedication of our volunteers and with the hands of community members, little by little, we’ve grown and added native plants to keystone and community sites throughout the Whakatipu Basin.
It turns out that lots of little adds up to a lot over time – in 2024 we celebrated planting our 100,000th tree.
All those volunteer-planted trees go into public spaces which include our eight keystone sites. Slopehill Reserve, managed by DoC, is one of these keystone sites and we started planting here in 2019. Volunteer efforts to date have been concentrated on planting riparian species along the stream edge.
In 2024 an incredible funding opportunity was presented to us by the local Hilton Queenstown Resort and Spa to supersize our planting efforts on this site.
We applied for and were granted a significant sum by the Hilton Global Foundation to plant out the hillside of the reserve. This allowed us to contract Mana Tāhuna Charitable Trust’s Te Taiao team to carry out the site preparation and planting on our behalf.
It’s fair to say that this kind of landscape-scale planting was only a pipe dream when we started planting at Slopehill Reserve in 2019.
Now looking down on the riparian strip are 29,000 native woodland species taking root on the hillside above (a figure that proved quite disruptive to the Y-axis on our annual reporting!)
The 22,000 trees planted through the Hilton Global Foundation project added to the 7000 planted as part of the He Rā Rākau Tītapu – King Charles III Coronation Plantings earlier in 2024.
While it may look like a sea of cardboard plant guards right now, this site will soon form a central part of the ecological corridor as the young plants become established.
And good news: we’re not done with Slopehill Reserve yet!
With all this in place, our project partners Mana Tāhuna got stuck in for the next six weeks executing our site preparation plan. They then rustled up a team of people to do the mahi of planting the trees and shrubs over the next 14 weeks.
This process would have taken around 10 years to carry out on volunteer power, with the sheer grind of folding 22,000 plant guards alone being an extremely time consuming process!
So many organisations, businesses and volunteers donated time, resources, vehicles and muscle to get this mahi done.
Beyond creating food and shelter for animals, restoring native wetlands and endemic forests, reducing soil erosion and sucking up an estimated 8138 tonnes of carbon, this project represents a legacy for those who participated in it.
For the many children who came out with their families or their schools to tuck some plants into their ready-dugs holes using the now renowned ‘Ninja fingers’ methods, being able to watch the trees grow over their lifetime will be a source of pride. Locals using the track can watch the area establish, as birds return and the waters running into the lake grow cleaner and clearer.
As the site is maintained over the next three years and we watch it grow, we can also use it as a template for other sites of its size. It shows that with the right recipe, we can do huge things for nature.
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