Green Lab – Watching nature move in
With Green Lab’s help, backyards of every kind are turning into thriving eco-friendly spaces that are functional as well as beneficial to biodiversity, food resilience and the well being of local communities.
Through Backyard Resilience workshops, people gain practical advice on how to enhance use of their section through appropriate plant choice and layout. The pay-to-attend sessions are a relatively new initiative for the charitable organisation formerly known as Greening the Rubble.
“Quite often people sort of know what they want to do in their garden, they just need a bit more clarity and someone to bounce ideas off,” says director Bridget Allen, who retrained in landscape architecture after running her own gardening business for about 20 years. Allen is also a Ilam fine arts graduate, sculptor and the instigator of Stitch-o-Mat, a sewing charity in New Brighton.
At the 3-hour Green Lab course, attendees get an aerial picture of their backyard so they can clarify such things as the angle of the sun at different times of the day and how they use and interact with their backyard space, and so decide on how to improve garden and plant placement.
“A printout might look something like this,” says Bridget, pointing to a sample photo on her office desk. “We then go for a walk around Christchurch’s botanic gardens to get [attendees] thinking about what kind of plants they like or what kind of materials they might want to use in their garden.”
The point of difference for Green Lab is that they aren’t primarily concerned with garden aesthetics. Their objective is to make backyards more ‘sustainable’, which not only means choosing plants that are suited to Christchurch conditions but also taking into account biodiversity (what plants will encourage insects and native wildlife) and design that is appropriate to the home owner’s lifestyle.
“Gardening has always been part of New Zealand culture, but now people are going into smaller houses. So people might choose to have more things in pots,” explains Bridget.
“A lot of people might not have the time to grow a lot of vegetables because they are working lots; they don’t want a high maintenance garden,” she adds.
Sustainability can also mean not going to the expense and effort of developing an area of backyard that is rarely used.
Environmental impacts, such as rainwater run-off, are also taken into account. Large concrete driveways, for example, offer challenges for managing increasing stormwater volumes.
Green Lab’s ethos of ‘greening’ encompasses both public and private spaces. The income from the pay-for workshops helps subsidise some of Green Lab’s public space projects. One such is a sensory play space in the red zone. Another is establishing native gardens at the Avon Hub, which houses Green Lab and other community and sporting organisations. The hub is the former gym of the old Shirley Boys High School, located on North Parade in the Shirley neighbourhood.
An underlying objective is to foster connections: between people, and between people and nature. A recent weta-hotel workshop illustrated this, with grandparents helping their mokopuna/grandkids make an insect home for their backyard.
“They’re gonna go home and watch nature move in,” says Bridget, which is a statement that succinctly sums up the organisation’s mahi generally.
(Nov 2023)
