A little bit of history

The Lands and Survey (L&S) Kerikeri nursery never propagated plants. L&S had a major nursery at Taupo and frost or cold sensitive plants were sent to Kerikeri to grow in a more benign climate. After The Department of Conservation (DOC) was formed from L&S, the Wild Life Service and elements of the Forest Service, as nurseries were not its core business, they were all closed down. The Kerikeri nursery lingered on, unfunded. A small volunteer group under Selwyn O’Kell grew a limited number of plants and species which contributed to early planting on Motupapa Island. In bad weather DOC occasionally allocated the “Ginger Boys" who eradicated ginger in Whangaroa, to work in the Shade House.

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In May 2000, when Rod Brown (who is still the Shade House co-ordinator) started the Shade House with Jo Hill as the propagator, even that minimal activity had ceased. It was a scene of neglect and weed infested plants. A group of about 10 people was formed and a learning process commenced. In our first year we only managed to distribute 3,700 plants. The strongly built Shade House structure remains intact after about 45 years but every aspect is now much modified. It is a team environment with the dedicated team members having a long-term commitment, many for more than 10 years.

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The evolution of our business model

Initially the Shade House fund-raised like every other volunteer group, an uncertain business; with support from DOC and an annual grant from Project Crimson. We gave our plants away for free. Investing in improvements started early. The old nursery was wholly covered in ancient 25-year-old shade cloth, with a home-made watering system of such power it could almost sluice the heads off plants. It was a one suit fits all shade and watering system. In 2002, DOC allowed us to use the $3,000 intended to replace the shade cloth over the whole nursery. This was spent on Tony Holmes’s ingeniously simple design of sliding shade cloth blinds on only 50% of the Shade House that are pulled across in summer.

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By 2005, production had reached 9,500 plants but the frustrating and precarious nature of fund raising and DOC’s inability to support what was not a core funded activity, caused us to charge for our plants. This placed a value on our work and growing high quality plants wanted by our customers at a  low price. This freed the team from the grind of fund raising and the risk that threatens most volunteer organisations of going out of business which would be a loss to Northland volunteer habitat restoration.

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Since charging modestly for our plants, with a steady revenue stream we have invested annually in capital and operating improvements. The skills of our technical team, Tony Holmes and Richard Tamaho, have been very valuable and costed at consultants and contractors’ rates, hiring such skills would have been unaffordable. For many years Tony designed and built more flexible watering systems and we now have 6 independent systems. Richard built a series of extensions to increase our efficiency and capacity to meet demand from increasingly popular community habitat restoration projects.   After Tony’s and Richards retirement Ian Cambourne took over infrastructure maintenance and improvements which enables the rest of the team to do what they do best - grow native plants.

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Jo Hill, followed by Theresa Vujcich, with their propagating skills sowed the seeds for our business but the all the long-serving, team has contributed to the many operational and production improvements; experience counts. Important support comes from Forest & Bird Far North Branch which looks after our accounts and enables us to have the simplest possible administrative structure and to get on with producing plants.

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Our philanthropy

By 2007 with increased production, we had a surplus, otherwise known as profit, which after funding capital investment, has enabled annual grants to be made to other environmental community groups which have no revenue stream and must fund raise. As at 2021 we have distributed more than $66,000 mainly to Forest & Bird and Puketi Forest Trust.