Planting group keeps vision alive even after Cyclone Gabrielle uproots conservation efforts

A Hawke's Bay conservation group is down, but not out, after flooding during Cyclone Gabrielle swept through their Esk Valley planting sites.

Despite a layer of silt nearly two metres deep along the banks, some of the hardy, three-year-old cabbage trees planted by the Esk River Planting Group still stand.

Local residents Dan Bergloff-Howes and Irene Cahill spent many hours down there, spades in hand. The group has, in three years, planted more than three hectares with 15,000 native trees.

Plans for their own plant nursery were under way before Cyclone Gabrielle sent a wave of water over the river banks and through the valley.

"It's probably about the second thing I thought of," Bergloff-Howes said. "I was worried about my house, and then I thought, 'Oh god, our plants'."

The new nursery site, which had been offered to the group by neighbouring forestry company Panpac, was now unusable, inundated with silt and debris.

But it was Panpac that found the kitset nursery in the aftermath, still mostly bundled together, and cleaned it up. It was now in the process of finding a new site on Panpac land to build it on.

The planting sites are on Crown land, administered by the Department of Conservation (DOC). An eDNA test had shown longfin and shortfin eels and pouched lamprey in the river itself.

The planting had been done entirely by the community, including busloads of pupils from Eskdale School. The hardest group to tap into had been the young adults, Cahill said.

Planting days attracted up to 100 people, even in the rain, and the work was made possible by donations of money and trees from the community, local businesses, and DOC. Post-cyclone, more than $42,000 came from the Hawke's Bay Foundation, to go towards work on the new nursery.

Despite the weight of water that rushed down the valley, many of the hardier plants were still clinging to the soggy ground.

Bergloff-Howes said the flood had been a real-life disaster test.

"You can't stop the weather events happening but you can minimise the damage by making sure that you've got the right trees in the right place."

Here, the right trees were karamu, kōwhai, lemonwood and lancebark, kānuka and mānuka, and of course the hardy cabbage trees.

Other areas remained totally buried under silt, but Cahill said not all was lost.

The group had begun as a collection of enthusiastic home gardeners, with guidance from experts from DOC and the regional council, and the past three years had provided lessons in everything from plant choice to weed control to flash floods.

"It's a learning exercise for us," Cahill said. "Initially we had quite a lot of species, and then during the last planting, we honed it down to about six or seven."

Bergloff-Howes said carrying on would be a way for some to process the trauma.

"It just makes the work even more important, actually," he said. "If you stop thinking about yourself, and start thinking about your grandchildren ... then that's really the only real, true answer."

If the land was to be deemed unsafe to live on because of the risk of future flooding, it could be used for recreation.

Bergloff-Howes said he would like to see it turned into a national park, and Cahill said she had visions of a native walkway along the edge of the river.

There was still money in the coffers, and eager hands to take up the spades. The flood had set them back about three years, they reckoned.