Our environmental team is restoring a slice of West Auckland land as part of an offsite mitigation planting, prompted by a nearby residential development.
Where rural West Auckland meets residential suburbia, a new housing development is taking shape at the south-west edge of Massey. There, a river winds its way through the landscape, cutting through the established township, council land and into the new development. The development’s impact on the river is the catalyst for this revegetation project.
Part of a stream that sprouts off the main river has been sacrificed to maximise the land use at this new development. And to mitigate this loss, the developers are obliged to remediate an area nearby. The site identified for this environmental restoration is at the Massey Pony Club, which leases council land situated off Glen Road, Massey.
Ecological Restoration Meets Landscape Construction
Nestled in the Te Rangi Hiroa-Birdwood reserve, the pony club shares part of the river and a number of its streams. Historically, there was a water jump that punctuated one of these streams. A non-compliant asset when assessed against modern healthy waterway legislation, the developer was obliged to re-naturalise the stream. Civil contractors, assisted by The Plant People’s construction division, built the footbridge and new culverts. By upgrading the culverts and retiring historic farm crossings, these features provide easy access for the horses to connect with all areas of the pony club’s property.
Our environmental team then revegetated the stream edge, allowing it to return to a near-natural state.
Adjacent to the footbridge, we’ve fenced off and planted a section of a paddock with new native plant species. Our team were able to work with some existing plants in this space. Spanning three separate areas, we have introduced just over 5,000 new plants. The revegetation project features predominantly a mixture of grasses and sedges, dappled with canopy and shrub species.
Parking v Planting
Massey Pony Club made a sacrifice in losing a portion of car parking to make way for some of this new planting. The significant upgrades to their stream crossings – where we have built two new culverts as well as the footbridge – plus the ecological restoration more than offset the inconvenience.
Landscape Maintenance
Following the successful planting and installations, the project now moves to our landscape maintenance team. They are applying all their care and attention to the area which is growing and developing as expected.
Offsite Mitigation Planting
The Plant People have completed several offsite mitigation planting projects. Another example is an area of riparian planting at our Dairy Flat nursery. Once established, it will serve as a closed-loop ecological success story as it becomes an onsite seed source to fuel future replanting projects across Auckland.
