Guy Bowden from Tawapou Coastal Natives donated 150 Northland native trees and plants worth more than $100,000 to Hundertwasser Arts Centre Rooftop Garden. Photo / Michael Cunningham
Guy Bowden from Tawapou Coastal Natives donated 150 Northland native trees and plants worth more than $100,000 to Hundertwasser Arts Centre Rooftop Garden. Photo / Michael Cunningham
Among the 4000 native plants that form Hundertwasser Art Centre's green crown are many rare - "almost extinct in the wild" - plant species.
The prized collection includes Three Kings kaikōmako (Pennantia baylisiana), endemic to the Three Kings Islands where only one plant is known to exist.
Cooks scurvy grass(Lepidium oleraceum), flowering white rātā, hibiscus from Ninety Mile Beach in the Far North, and many other Northland natives considered threatened in the wild adorn the centre's rooftop.
Tawapou Coastal Natives owner Guy Bowden, who grew and supplied the rare species, described it as an experimental garden because the majority of the plants have never been tested on a rooftop before.
"Some things will fail and some will thrive, and isn't that nature?"
Guy Bowden has planted the rare white flowering rātā in the Hundertwasser rooftop garden. Photo / Michael Cunningham
Bowden has been a part of the project for the past seven years. He has donated about 150 trees, worth more than $100,000, to the last authentic Hundertwasser building in the world.
Although it may appear like a regular rooftop garden it is much more complicated, Bowden remarked.
"Rooftop gardens are usually grass and small shrubs and relatively easy but this project was more complicated as trees were also a part of the blueprint.
"We needed more weight, and have to grow the roots out and stabilise the trees for a certain amount of time."
Bowden said they could only use limited material and since there was no soil, the plants had to be grown in sand.
"In rooftop gardening, the trees have to be really managed in terms of height and weight. One has to regularly measure the volume of the tree and trunk.
"The total weight of a tree is divided into three equal parts – roots, trunk, and top – and each tree is not allowed to exceed 1500kg."
Bowden said it would take three to five years for the place to settle and reach its potential.
Hundertwasser Arts Centre Rooftop visitor host Lucy Andrews with Three Kings kaikōmako. It is endemic to the Three Kings Islands, where only one plant is known to exist. Photo / Michael Cunningham
For him, the project was not just a regular garden but a place that kept evolving in itself.
"People are not usually going to find the plants planted here elsewhere. For example, kaikōmako planted here is threatened by habitat loss.
"The single tree [female] known in the wild grows on a scree slope on the northern face of Great Island. Scientists have since been able to find out that some seeds of the tree were making small amounts of pollen and from that, they have made some Aphrodite plants, but still, no male plant has been found yet.
