Fiona McDonald, Āwhitu

A PASSIONATE PLANTSWOMAN WHO TURNED HER TALENT FOR PROPAGATION INTO A FORCE FOR GOOD, SETTING UP A PLANT STALL OUTSIDE HER HOME AND RAISING THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS FOR LOCAL CHARITIES.

“There are so many plants you used to be able to get that you cannot find now. So I concentrated on growing the more unusual things for the plant stall.”

Fiona McDonald’s quarter-acre garden on Āwhitu Peninsula is positively packed with plants, unsurprisingly given her lifetime love of gardening: she was the creator of Four Winds garden at Kohekohe, the head gardener at Glenbrook Steel Mill, and has over the years been a regular guest expert evaluating the plant trials at Auckland Botanic Gardens. So it’s also perhaps unsurprising that she counts among her friends some of the country’s best known plant fanatics and so has managed to acquire along the way cuttings and seeds of an incredible range of unusual ornamentals and much of what she grows is rare or otherwise hard to find.

“I’m a bit of a collector,” she admits. “I only have room for my favourite plants now, but there’s always something popping up. My main thing is colour. I just love colour.”

She also loves propagation, she confesses. “It’s my weakness,” she says. “I just can’t help myself. Even when I prune, I always try and strike everything I cut off.” And that, she says, is how her plant stall started.

“In lockdown I was working in the garden and taking all these cuttings and I just thought, what am I going to do with all these plants,” she explains.

“So I hit on the idea of ordering a trolley online and sticking it out on the road. And it just took off.”

With neighbours walking around the local streets, most plants costing just $2 (“well, I wanted everyone to be able to afford them”) and with Fiona having plants you can’t easily find even when the shops were open – trade was brisk.

She has now made more than $8000, all of which has been donated to Āwhitu Volunteer Fire Brigade, St Johns Ambulance, Coastguard and the Westpac Rescue Helicopter.

The farm where she established Four Winds has now gone to her children and so Fiona is back there helping her daughter with the garden. And that, plus another grandchild on the way, has meant she’s now mentoring another local woman to take on the plant stall. “But it’s fun to pass it along too,” she says. “Years ago a friend said to me that knowledge is wasted if it is not shared. That is something that has stuck with me ever since.”