What to do in Auckland - Orakei

Orakei  is a suburb of Auckland city, in the North Island of New Zealand, situated on the eastern train line. Only one station away from Britomart you find a nice walk leading around a bay. A footpath connects the train stations Orakei and Meadowbank.

There is also a possibility to do water skiing.
We took a swim over there next to the water ski mooring, very warm water, but lots of seaweed.We went further on the path, there we saw that the sewages of the houses lead directly into the water.Therefore we would not recommend swimming. 
The path leads along gardens, next to the water, with resting places and benches. A very calm place to relax, just next to the city.
To go round the bay will take you about an hour walking.

Community garden Ranui

Ranui Community garden

Ranui is situated in the west of Auckland, not far from the Waitakere Ranges. There is a direct trainline from Britomart and also 135 bus service from Auckland center.

Originally there were grapefruit orchards and saw mills there. The main road is Greatenorth Road connecting to Swanson Road which provided transport for the sawmills which were out at Bethells Beach.

2003 the Ranui Community came to the local government and asked if they could use public land which was underused to build and develop a community garden. This took some time, but permission was granted.

The idea of the garden was a woman called Melody Shinneck. She encouraged a group of Ranui residence to help develop the garden. Funding was optained from Ministry of Social Developement to employ one man to calculate the área of the garden and divide it into plots for local families to use. This work relied on volunteers. It soon became apparent that people moved to other áreas and volunteers were difficult to find. The Ranui Community house then took over the running of the garden after the Ministry of Social Developement was no longer able to provide funding. The Ranui Community Center is an incooperated society so it has legal standing. It has a commity which makes decisions about community events and it also has the ability to seek funding from government agencies.

The community center was able to advertise the existence of the garden, offer workshops on composting, seed raising, transplanting,…It started children´s and adult´s classes and because there were a large number of people coming through the Community center the community was able to get the message to local residence about the community garden and what it offered.

Today there is a garden manager who works both at the garden and at the community center and she establishes relationships with any groups who are undertaking similar ventures and groups who may be able to benefit the garden or the gardeners.

The garden is shaped in a circle and there are two tears of plots, one is pieshaped of 25 meters and the other one is also nearly pieshaped. Each plots costs the gardener 30 or 35 Nz-Dollars per year. The gardener can plant whatever he wishes, as long as it is organically. The group raised money to build a shadehouse for seedlings, a large tree provides shade for the gardeners and is also the focus of any celebration times, where a pizza oven, also built by the gardeners , is used to raise for garden projects and parties.

All community groups and individuals are able to lease a plot, as handicapped, refugees, church groups, or combinations.

Butterfly house

New Lynn Butterfly house

http://www.westlynngarden.org.nz/index.html

New Lynn lies on the western train and bus route of Auckland, 10 kilometres tot he southwest of Auckland city centre.

There is a lot of through traffic .

The  garden of 4.5 acres used to belong to a nursery man, Jack Clarc,  the founder of Eden Garden,

http://www.edengarden.co.nz/our-history/

 where he planted seeds and plants for Eden Garden.

When he got older, he sold this place to Eden Garden Society, in the early 80th. He must have asked the council if he could develop the plot into a garden with the help of volunteers. That land doc and eden garden society looked after the area, so they have not to pay fort the right to work on the land.

The West Lynn Garden Society is now an independent organisation of volunteers who love gardening.

The local trust gave them money to construct the butterfly house. The trust gets money from the pokey machines and this money you can ask for community projects.

30000 dollars were financed 20 years ago, and now the butterfly house must be restored. The West Lynn Garden Society just started to have 2 half payed persons to look after the books.

Regular 14 volunteers work here, and others once a month or a fornight.

At the moment you only can see heaps of Monarc butterflies in and outside the Butterfly house.

The volunteers also tried yellow admiral and the red admiral These butterflies live on stinging nettle, but the people touched it and there were problems. The admirals chased the monarc from their plants, they were quite aggressive. They also tried to breed copper butterfly. They live on sorrel, but they did not breed in the butterfly house.

The community has a propagating house and a shade house to harden up the swamp plants. They keep the swamp plants in pots and put them into the butterfly house.

From November to June the butterfly house is the main attraction. Even in winter they fly around the garden.

The garden itself has lots of camelias ( late autumn), a lot of stock plants are still around. Especially azalea and colored leaves attract people in autumn. Also rhododendrons and magnelias are of interest for garden clubs.

Since there is a fence there is not so much damage. It always happens that the children kill butterflies or pick flowers, but it is getting better. Sometimes ladies pick flowers and they must be asked to leave the flowers or small plants where they are to be seen by everyone.

The domain name, the website and the booking they have to pay.

They have weddings here up to 120 people, they also can hire the building. Childrens birthday party are famous recently.

Pasifica - Auckland event

On the weekend of March the 12th and the13th 2016 the festival of Pasifica took place in Western Springs, Auckland . Not for the first time, this was already the 24th time that the festival took place. The idea of the festival is to bring Pacific Island communities together and show the variety of their values, culture and lifestyles.

A special bus shuttle was operating from Britomart to Western Springs and there were a lot of parking possibilities around the area. Also normal bus routes stop at Western Springs.

Western Springs is a park with a lake in the middle and around the lake there were stages of different pacific events.
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasifika_Festival

Islands like Hawai, Fiji, Samoa, but also Maoris of New Zealand had their own stage and around shops with their typical handicrafts, clothes and food.Some of the stalls were run by community groups. For the visitors creative activities took place as well, as weaving, lei making, ukelele lesson, drumming or carving. Each ethic group had their special program, a mixture of music, dancing and information about themselves. There were no seats prepared, the people sat down on the grass with their food and drinks, watching one of the programs.

The entrance was free and there were a lot of people joining the festival, but because the area was so big, there was no bad feeling because of the crowd.  Walking from one stage to the other was relaxing, the birds of the park were not shy and some were begging for food.

At Western Springs you also can find Auckand Zoo and Motat (Museum of Transport and Technology). The park with its lake, ales and birds is also worth visiting when there is no festival. 

The event ended at 4 p.m., very early for an event, and the people left the park quite clean, what is also exceptional for an event :) The festival was well organized, even tents for eventually lost kids could be found and we think that nobody got lost because of the clear information that was preserved.