Hinewai’s Hugh Wilson recreates a lost paradise on Banks Peninsula

The community across Banks Peninsula was shocked last year when the death of local legend Hugh Wilson was reported on the radio.

No one was more surprised to hear the news of his demise than Wilson himself.

“People kept asking my friends, ‘Is Hugh gone?’” says the 81-year-old botanist and world-recognised conservationist, who was ranked among the South Island’s most influential figures in Christchurch’s daily newspaper. “It was hilarious.”

The false alarm made it into Pīpipi, a handwritten and hand-illustrated newsletter Wilson sends out every six months reporting on the goings-on at Hinewai, the 1700ha ecological restoration reserve where he’s been kaitiaki for the past four decades.

Apparently, the confusion arose when some of his supporters misheard a radio broadcast on the death of former All Blacks captain Stu Wilson. As it turns out, the two men had more in common than you might think.

Hugh was briefly captain of the First XV at St Andrew’s College in Christchurch (where he was dux), although he never actually scored a try, so Stu did have the edge on him there.

Tributes to the wily All Blacks winger described him as a “good bloke” with an ebullient and charismatic personality, known for his big laugh, warmth and storytelling. They could just as easily have been talking about Hugh.

Last week, Akaroa’s Trinity Church Hall was packed for the launch of his new book, Hinewai Reflections: The Artwork of Hugh Wilson.

Sumptuously produced, it features more than 190 bird and plant illustrations compiled from his long career, with accompanying text and a botanist’s meticulous eye for detail. His niece, writer and novelist Sarah Quigley, helped with the editing.

More than 800 copies of the book had been pre-ordered. At the launch, people waited patiently – and at great length – in the signing queue as Wilson engaged in conversation with every single one of them.

Yesterday afternoon, he did it all over again in Christchurch at the Knox Centre, where his father was once a Presbyterian minister.

It’s a sign of the passing years that Wilson didn’t bike the entire 95km from Hinewai to Christchurch, as he’s done in the past, but cycled to Akaroa and caught the bus instead.

Despite having had two hip replacements, he still rides into Akaroa most weeks, facing a gruelling climb on the homeward stretch that he reckons gets longer and steeper each time.

A committed ecologist, he hasn’t owned a car for years. The manager’s house, where he lives on-site at Hinewai, is powered by solar panels.

There’s no Wi-Fi, and he doesn’t have a mobile phone or a computer, either, preferring to reply to all correspondence by hand.

“I did own a car once, years and years ago,” he says. “What a waste of time and money that was. People keep trying to give me an e-bike. I love the idea, but I’m just not ready for one yet.”

Hinewai’s origin story dates back to the 1980s, when Christchurch businessman Maurice White set up a trust to fund his dream of creating a native bird forest on Banks Peninsula.

At the time, Wilson was doing a detailed botanical survey of the whole peninsula, which was once blanketed in forest. By 1900, the bush had been cleared so extensively that only 1% of old growth was left, and about half of the breeding birds had been lost.

“The ecology of this place had just been trashed,” he says. “I thought I was setting out to record the remnants. But after a few months of field work, I thought, gosh, it’s not what we’ve lost, it’s what’s still here. Nature was just itching to get the forest back.”

So, when White asked him to keep his eye out for a piece of land that might be suitable for restoration, Wilson jumped at the chance. For the next 10 years, he worked on the project for nothing, earning some money on the side as a freelance botanist.

Hinewai began small in 1987 with the purchase of 109ha of poor-quality farm pasture smothered in gorse, and has gradually expanded through the purchase of neighbouring blocks. A 192ha section is managed on behalf of another trust.

Today, the landscape is a mosaic of native forest in various stages of development, from ancient tōtara, mataī and kahikatea to fuchsia, māhoe and red beech.

Hundreds of kilometres of public walking tracks now wind through bush-covered valleys teeming with birdlife and rain-fed waterfalls. Even most of the plant species once believed to be locally extinct have been rediscovered.

At Wilson’s house, overlooking the Ōtānerito/Long Bay Valley and down to the sea, several Pittosporum obcordatum trees grow outside his window. For 170 years, the species was thought to have been lost on the peninsula.

The reserve remains in private ownership through the Maurice White Native Forest Trust, but is open to the public year-round. A display at the visitors centre shows just how dramatic the transformation has been.

“It was an awful-looking landscape of burned kānuka, sprayed gorse, pasture that was just rapidly coming back into gorse again,” says Wilson. “So it’s changed from a very rundown, totally unproductive, marginal hill-country farm and it’s basically bush now. And it’s all just nature putting the forest back.”

What is so remarkable about Hinewai is that this regeneration has been achieved without any significant planting.

Instead of going into battle with infestations of gorse, which is notoriously difficult to eradicate, it’s left untouched – becoming a canopy for self-seeding natives that can tolerate shade.

As the gorse opens out, the natives push through into the light. Starved of sunshine, the gorse then dies off naturally. Apparently, it makes excellent firewood.

Wilson says the process was already well-known in ecological circles, although even some experts believed the pace of change would be far slower. Of course, most of the local farmers thought he was an absolute nutter.

The title of a short documentary made on Hinewai in 2019, Fools & Dreamers, was inspired by a letter to the editor, published in response to an article by Wilson in the Akaroa Mail.

Declaring the scheme “ridiculous”, the writer suggested a better contribution to the economy would be planting a rotating timber crop of pine trees. “Heaven help us from fools and dreamers!”

Wilson took that as a great compliment. “We need more fools and dreamers in the world,” he says in the documentary, which has had 4.5 million views on YouTube.

Now, even the most sceptical farmers are on board, trusting what they can see with their own eyes. A recent newspaper story described Wilson as “the Godfather of peninsula conservation” for his work at Hinewai and the inspiration for a new heritage walking track at Le Bons Bay.

In 1991, his work was acknowledged internationally when he became the first person in the Southern Hemisphere to be awarded the Bloomer Medal by the Linnaean Society of London for his contribution to botany.

The Fools & Dreamers documentary made a reluctant celebrity out of Wilson. The day before our visit, a German couple who’d just arrived in New Zealand made Hinewai their first stop, and a PhD student from the United States had also turned up.

“I get a buzz out of that, for sure,” he says. “It does take up a lot of time, but it’s good for me because, as I’m getting a little bit less capable of doing a whole day’s work out in the wild, I think it’s more my role to do that.”

While carbon credits supply some income, Hinewai also relies on donations to maintain the reserve and fund future land purchases. Another 88ha of farmland was recently added and further expansions are planned.

One significant contributor is the Holdfast Collective, a non-profit organisation established in 2022 by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard that funnels 98% of the company’s annual excess profits to combat the environmental crisis, support biodiversity and engage in political advocacy.

Greg Curtis, executive director of the Holdfast Collective, describes Hinewai as an inspiring blueprint for community-led conservation across Aotearoa. “What Hugh Wilson and friends have achieved at Hinewai shows just how quickly nature can recover when it’s given the chance.”

Dirtbook Billionaire, a book about Chouinard by New York Times climate journalist David Gelles, was published last year. Wilson read it recently and is a big fan.

“Yvon had a sign on his desk at one stage saying, ‘If you’re a billionaire, you’re a moral failure’,” he says, approvingly. “He had to consult with his kids [about diverting their inheritance] and they said that was absolutely fine.”

Wilson’s own parents were both liberal and “very outdoorsy people”. Growing up in Christchurch, he became fascinated with drawing birds – planting the family garden with natives in the hopes of attracting more of them.

At high school, he was caned for defacing his textbooks with illustrations of birds, plants and imaginary landscapes. Drawing remains one of his greatest delights, using a pencil to create lightning sketches in the field and then working them up at home.

Some of his illustrations are exhibited for sale at the Orion Powerhouse Gallery in Akaroa, with the proceeds going straight back into Hinewai, as will any profit made from the sales of his book.

He says the world fades away when he sits down at his drawing desk or the piano. “Instead of thinking,’ I must clear this track’ or ‘that boundary’s got to be done’, time evaporates. It just doesn’t exist, really.”

Three full-time staff work alongside Wilson at Hinewai, which has benefited from intensive pest control that has largely eradicated possums and wild goats on the peninsula.

Hundreds of native plant species can be found across the reserve, including more than 60 different types of ferns, and emerald-green jewelledgeckos dart through the bush.

Hikers can drink from the streams and the bush is alive with birdsong: pīpipi (the little brown creeper), korimako (bellbird), pīwakawaka (fantail), tauhou (silverye), kererū (New Zealand’s native pigeon), kārearea (our native falcon) and inquisitive ngirungiru (tomtits) among them.

“We’ve even got riflemen – tītīpounamu. They look so vulnerable and so tiny, but they’re thriving,” says Wilson, who began learning te reo at university and often has Māori immersion groups coming through for the day.

Next year, Hinewai will mark its 40th anniversary. Through the decades, it’s weathered a series of natural disasters, including the Canterbury earthquakes. In 2011, a devastating fire caused by a lightning strike burned for 27 hours across 25% of the reserve.

Forced to evacuate to Akaroa on his bike, Wilson says it was one of the most traumatic events of his life. He returned to find his home untouched, and the regenerated bush has now surpassed its stage of growth at the time of the fire.

Five years ago, heavy rain triggered a series of massive slips. Again, the recovery has been “phenomenal”. Nature’s resilience never fails to astonish Wilson, who keeps detailed weather records and has witnessed the impact of climate change on his doorstep.

Carved above the entrance to his house is a Māori proverb: Toitu he kainga, whatungarongaro he tangata. “The best translation is, ‘The land alone endures, people fade away.’ Isn’t that good?” he says.

“I love the Māori attitude to this because the word for land is whenua and it’s also the word for placenta. That might sound a bit airy-fairy, but it just completely sums up that the earth is really our mother. We’re totally dependent on her. Without nature, we’re nothing.

“A lot of modern society just seems to be getting less aware of that, while they stare at their cell phones and computer screens. People go on and on about the economy. When we get the economy right, we’ll look after the ecology. That’s completely back to front, obviously.

“It’s far from impossible that we will wipe ourselves out, the way we’re going, but nature won’t be extinct. She’ll lose a whole lot of diversity, including Homo sapiens, but then she’ll bounce back, as we see her doing after these little disasters here.

“Nature is just unbelievably resilient, so we’re not going to lose the planet. We’re not going to lose nature. But we’ve got a serious risk of losing ourselves.”

Wilson hopes to see out his time at Hinewai, dropping dead one day out walking in the bush. When co-founder Maurice White died in 2019, at the age of 96, Hinewai’s treasurer, Bruce Hansen, suggested planting a kahikitea in his memory.

“Then Bruce said, ‘We should plant a tree for you, too,’” says Wilson. “I said, ‘But I’m not dead yet. And he said, ‘But you will be soon!’”

The two kahikatea, which come from the same seed source, are now growing close together near the bottom of the Wainui track.

“My one, which was planted much later, is about thistall now," says Wilson. “Maurice is still way down here.”

Laughing uproariously, he sets off back up the track, sunlight flashing off the kererū feather he’s tucked into his cap.

Joanna Wane is a senior lifestyle writer with an interest in social issues and the arts.