HWMAC: Don’t believe the roof hype

I feel sorry for my friends Guy and Sandra Bowden after their wonderfully generous donation of hundreds of living plants to the Hundertwasser Wairau Maori Art Centre (HWMAC) project, that they then become associated with the fabulists who are perpetuating a terminological inexactitude about this rooftop garden.

It is not, and is not even close to, the “largest” rooftop planting in the southern hemisphere. HWMAC has a ground floor area of some 921 square metres; even allowing for the slope of the roof and a 52 sq m terrace, the total garden area cannot be more than about 1750 sq m.

Tauranga Hospital has had a 2850 sq m rooftop garden, complete with pohutukawa and pukas, since 1971. The Victorian Desalination Plant in Australia has a vastly greater rooftop planting of 26,000 sq m, nearly 15 times larger than my estimate for HWMAC.

The claim of “largest” is being promulgated as a black lie.

And as for the term “afforested”? A forest is a natural eco-system, and forests vary hugely around the globe, according to climate, geography, and other factors. The HWMAC rooftop garden is not a forest, it is a man-made garden; one could even call it a botanical zoo. Despite the good intentions behind it, it is an artifice and it will only ever be as good as the standard of maintenance it is given. The irony of it all is that Northland already has one of the most natural, largest afforested rooftops one could wish for – the natural roof over Rikoriko Sea Cave on the Poor Knights. Sadly, out-of-bounds.

Finally, may I gently chide your newspaper, in that it should not mindlessly perpetuate the puffery given out about local projects – do a little bit of questioning and factchecking before publishing.

David Muir

Master Landscaper (retired)