Once upon a time trees in a Te Kopuru garden started sprouting strange fruit.
Where flowers should have bloomed, glass buoys and floats began to blossom in Leon and Lorraine Searle's prettily fenced yard.
A large crop of glass, plastic and cork buoys and fishing floats soon flourished. Garlands of old ropes, fishing nets and sails dripped from every tree, stump and fence. Underneath them dinghies seemed to float in little seas of shells. Whale bones lay beached on the lawn. Mermaids and other fantastic creatures from the deep began to appear, fashioned from driftwood or timber off shipwrecks.
After 35 years of collecting, there's not much in the Searles' garden that wasn't once flotsam or jetsam chewed over by the sea and spat out on the nearby west coast.
Tucked near Dargaville at the start of the long Pouto Peninsula, Te Kopuru isn't a place many people go for sightseeing, so the fame of the Searles' amazing technicolour corner is surprising.
And their astonishing result of many years' beachcombing stops traffic. "One time we counted 60 cars stopped outside," Leon said. "We see people drive past with their heads sticking out of sunroofs, others taking photographs out of the window as a car goes by." There's a glimpse of their garden in a National Bank TV ad, and it has appeared in magazines, books, and New Zealand Geographic.
These days Leon doesn't often go looking for treasure along Ripiro Beach or around Kaipara Harbour's north head. But high and dry outside the retired commercial fisherman's house there's a wonderland of bounty already fished from the sea.
Flotsam fruit create fantasyland
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.