Grandchildren (from left) Aza Fleming, 9, and Sierra Fleming, 7, help Cheryll Martin with the verge garden she's put down outside her Birkdale home. Photo / Jason Dorday
Grandchildren (from left) Aza Fleming, 9, and Sierra Fleming, 7, help Cheryll Martin with the verge garden she's put down outside her Birkdale home. Photo / Jason Dorday
After moving around for most of her life, Cheryll Martin is finally ready to "put deep roots" into her neighbourhood.
Like many New Zealanders, she had never stayed anywhere for long until she met her partner Jon Burton and nine years ago moved into the Birkdale property that he had lived in since his childhood.
"I wasn't used to living in one place for very long," she says.
"My parents were in the air force so I moved around a lot, I went to 11 schools. For me to stay, I have to get deep roots into the community, so that's what I'm trying to do."
Last year she started a raised garden in her back yard and had some timber left over.
At about the same time she visited the Kaipatiki Local Board's community co-ordinator, Jill Nerheny, who runs summer activities in the local parks, and was captivated by a sign in her office saying "I love my neighbourhood".
"I saw it in her office and said, 'Can I have one?'" she says.
She and Mr Burton framed it, stuck it on the outside of their fence on the corner of Birkdale Rd and Salisbury Rd, and used the left-over timber to build a small raised garden in front of it.
"I had been following a Facebook page called 'On the verge' and I thought I'd love to do that, I'd love to have something myself where it's an opportunity to meet people and chat to them as they walk past," she says.
"People do stop and talk. I'm out there nattering and they beep their horns and yell out, 'Great garden!'"
After she added a kind of floral mural made of green hose and brightly painted wheel rims, people also started dropping off wheel rims at the gate.
Ms Martin, whose day job is running Volunteering Auckland, has also set up "social gardeners" and "social crafts" groups at the local Birkdale community house. "Social" means they're aimed at working people like her who have spare time only at nights and weekends.
She has also started a "Salisbury Rd social group", a bunch of eight or nine women in the street who get together socially.
Ms Nerheny, who put up the first "I love my neighbourhood" sign on a local board noticeboard in Eskdale Rd, says there are now "six or seven or 12 of them" around the area.
"People are cottoning on quite quickly now and ringing me up to come and get them," she says.
"People tell me we are more cohesive. That is because we've been at neighbourly things for 30 years.
"I think, now that a lot of things are happening, more and more people have been to look at our operation and seen how they could perhaps have the same sort of effect."
Up the creek togerther
West Auckland group the Boaties have made cleaning up the area's waterways their mission. Photo / Davian Lorson
A group of West Aucklanders who call themselves the "Boaties" have found a novel way to get to know their neighbours - on the water.
The half-dozen men and their boats were enlisted a few years ago to help in an annual clean-up of Henderson Creek by Project Twin Streams, a community group supported by the former Waitakere City Council and now by Community Waitakere.
Graeme Tearle, 59, says he was happy to help.
"We use our boats for fishing 99 per cent of the time. This is giving something back to the community with the assets that we have," he says.
Over about five years he has helped to haul up plastic bags and bottles, car tyres and timber.
Gary Rakich, 54, says his crew ends up covered in mud.
"The guys in the crew tend to have to get out," he says. "I had one guy struggling for about half an hour to get a chair from the water under the bridge. It weighed half a tonne."
Jim Bailey, who lives nearby in Te Atatu Rd, says when he joined four years ago the Boaties trawled the creek with a big turnout of people who cleaned up along the riverbanks.
The land-based clean-up ended after needles were found on the stream bank, and since then professionals have taken over the shore work. But the Boaties have stuck to the voluntary ethos that inspired their founder, Ron Tittleton.
Mr Bailey also mentors boys through Avondale-based Big Buddy.
"We've had children come with us and now they say, 'I love my creek, this is my creek now'," he says. "Just by spending a bit of time on the creek, they feel some ownership."
