An ever-growing love affair with nature

Fred Allen says growing native plants at his Stokes Valley nursery is satisfying for all sorts of reasons. Above he poses with a punga, while below he holds an iris, Libertia edgarae, found mainly on the coast around Wellington. ALL through his working life Stokes Valley’s Fred Allen has dabbled in numerous fields, from landscaper, greenkeeper and qualified horticulturalist to salesman, entrepreneur and nurseryman. But the common thread all the while has been his passion for nature, the collecting of seeds and the growing of plants or, as he puts it, ‘‘my babies’’.

‘‘Our ancestors were horticulturalists, agriculturalists and hunters and gatherers, it’s part of our psyche, it’s in our DNA.

‘‘It’s calming, it’s peaceful . . . some people like to knit, some people like to meditate, they do many things that calm them and this is my thing.’’

For the past 25 years he’s put his passion to work as a nurseryman in his own business, called Kiwi Plants.

Based in Lower Hutt, the familyrun nursery focuses on propagating New Zealand native plants.

‘‘We supply for and undertake rare, threatened and endangered species recovery programmes and specialise in revegetation for all New Zealand specialised habitats,’’ Allen says.

While he supplies plants to mainly commercial nurseries, councils, Department of Conservation, iwi, and other organisations nationwide, he’s big on encouraging the public to plant natives too.

‘‘We grow a range of species for a range of habitats, whether it be for amenity planting for councils, an ecological planting for a conservation project or for a farmer’s block of land.’’

For instance, he recently finished a landscaping job in Makara, planting colonising species such as tarata, manuka and kanuka, toetoe, tauhinu, flaxes, tussocks and mingimingi in what he describes as a harsh environment.

‘‘The flaxes Phormium tenax and Phormium cookianum are very versatile – they can grow three metres tall in good soil and in a sheltered environment but out there they only get to half a metre and they survive the goats!’’

He speaks of another project he’s done for Fonterra, collecting large amounts of Riparian sedge seeds from within the Waikato, for the diary giant to sow this seed along kilometres of its stream sites in the Waikato.

Allen especially encourages enhancement planting, that is, the planting of endangered and threatened native species.

‘‘We used to have 175 species in the Wellington coastal region, but now there’s only about 35 – we have many local extinctions, and we’re encouraging people to plant them again.’’

He gives the example of the whau tree – botanically named Entelia arborescens, a fast-growing coastal tree with large soft heartshaped serrated bright green leaves and a unique seed head.

‘‘It’s also known as the cork tree, it’s lighter than balsawood and Maori used it for the floats of their fishing nets back in the day.’’

The only one remaining in a public space in the Wellington region is in Percy’s Reserve in Petone.

‘‘I’ve got it growing in Stokes Valley and its maybe eight metres tall now, and you can successfully grow it throughout the Wellington region except in frost-prone valleys.’’

The extinct and endangered local native iris is one genera Fred is helping to save, and he’s planted groups of species in his stock beds, sold them to local customers and planted them in other locations such as a marae.

‘‘I love the challenge of breaking seed dormancy and seeing large numbers of seedlings, plugs and root trainers in the trays and keeping most of them healthy.’’

Each year Allen’s goal is to produce two million native seedlings a year with the goal of going on to sell about one million of them. And he has a monthly stock list with hundreds of New Zealand native species, with everything from Astelias to Xeronema on his website.

To come up with such a list requires a balance of physical work and office tasks.

‘‘My wife Kath and I run the company, I do a lot of sales and research and development, but I don’t just sit in the office, I like to be engaged physically, it’s important I stay connected with the environment.’’

With help from their two fulltime staff, they do it through collecting seeds from the region’s diverse habitats.

Propagation entails harvesting, storage, and sowing those seeds, irrigating, weeding, spray applications and the list goes on.

Then there are the couple’s two side-line businesses, Kiwi Environmental, an export marketing company with product licenses from Kiwi Herbs, which specialises in providing native biological materials for wellness products.

He does plenty of research and development for his own range of products, expanding on his interest and expertise in Rongoa Maori (traditional Maori medicine).

‘‘I promote the preservation and sustainability of the New Zealand rare and endangered flora and fauna by introducing the commercialisation potential of the species for herbal medicinal usage, and also link the ethnobotany cultural paradigm.

‘‘For instance, in Rongoa Maori traditional medicine, the native land snail that eats the harakeke was also used for traditional medicine – many insects and other organisms consume medicinal materials and they themselves become the medicine.

‘‘There’s a complexity and centricity in the world’s natural cycles, that we have disassociated ourselves a bit from this, being in the modern digital world, being distanced from nature, and these sorts of things have been forgotten, or lost,’’ says Allen, who is of Maori descent himself.

‘‘Some of the lesser known and rarer plants we have in the nursery Photos: JOHN NICHOLSON/STUFF are high in a particular medical value. For instance, we’ve selected a lot of manuka chemotypes from around the country and commercialised those, so now customers are either growing different chemotypes to extract the oil or planting them for manuka UMF honey production.’’

Allen’s love for plants and nature stems from his childhood.

He recalls his father’s vegetable garden which he always took an interest in, and the chickens and goats he looked after on their Porirua property.

‘‘I used to play the medicine man with the chooks, trying various remedies on them, and I’d collect puha on the way home from school to scatter in the chicken run.’’

As a result, his first job was working in the school holidays as a gardener at the Swiss ambassador’s residence in Woburn, Lower Hutt. That turned into fulltime work as a trainee gardener when he left school at 15, tending the glasshouse, and growing flowers, fruit and vegetables for the ambassador’s residence.

He left there to become groundsman at Tawa College, his tasks being new plantings, mowing, marking out the sports field and maintaining machinery.

A few years on he went contracting himself, as a landscaper.

‘‘I had a truck, a landscape crew and we did a lot of work around Whitby and Porirua – my last job was landscaping the Whenua Tapu cemetery at Pukerua Bay.’’

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