The Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust’s (BPCT) goal is to enhance indigenous biodiversity and promote sustainable land management on Banks Peninsula.
One of the best ways to reach this goal is by working in partnership with landowners to establish conservation covenants, which enable the long-term protection of indigenous flora and fauna. These special areas are safeguarded forever, and many of them include unique landscape, waterway or heritage values, and they complement farming activities well.
Often covenants sit on steep hill country, lie in valleys and gullies or are spread over rocky outcrops or wetlands - areas unproductive for farming, but which have significant biodiversity value. When protected and effectively managed, they contribute direct biodiversity gains and can improve soil and water quality, plant and animal pest control, erosion proneness and carbon sequestration.
A great example of this is ‘Wairewa Four’ covenant, located on Latham’s sheep and beef farm on the hills above Little River and Western Valley. The property features ancient remnant forest, regenerating bushland, and waterways that feed into local streams and water supplies.
This covenant, and the areas that it connects to, encompasses both new and precious existing biodiversity values, including majestic old podocarp trees (tōtara, and mataī) that date hundreds, and some even to around a thousand years old or more.
Ecologist, Geoff Walls, noted the surprising diversity of native plant and animal species, resulting from the covenants’ altitudinal range, where lowland and upland elements mingle. These covenants are havens for many ecologically rare and threatened native species.
Having a significant area under protection enables more fragile species’ populations to survive and thrive through whole ecosystem stability. The impressive array of fern species is testament to this. Noted botanist, Hugh Wilson, remarked that “the ferns, tree ferns, Tmesipteris [hanging fork ferns], make this a very exciting plot, along with the superlative tōtara.”
Wairewa Four is a lynchpin connecting two existing key covenants at the head of the catchment, together covering around 50ha. They lie in close proximity to a major swathe of protected land (both public and private) stretching from Kaituna Valley to Waipuna Saddle and into Western Valley, an area totaling over 2,200ha. There is also another landscape scale ‘biodiversity hub’ gathering momentum from Wairewa southward across to High Bare Peak and beyond, and eastward toward Te Roto O Wairewa Lake Forsyth and surroundings.
“Covenants are key ‘puzzle pieces’ in the mosaic of connecting protected land. They act as conduits for the protection and enhancement of biodiversity on a large and more effective scale,” said BPCT Covenants Officer, Marie Meal. “These covenants are wonderful reminders of what Banks Peninsula once was – and what parts of it can be again, thanks to the generosity and foresight of landowners like the Lathams.”
Decades of Conservation – a Latham legacy:
Matt’s Great Great Grandfather, W Montgomery was amongst Canterbury’s early settlers – a politician, and later a gold and timber merchant who eventually settled in Little River.
Montgomery and his son WH Montgomery had the foresight to protect a beautiful and prominent forested area – in ironic contrast to the early settlers’ seemingly insatiable need to deforest the Peninsula in order to establish thriving and productive pastureland.
Montgomery Park Scenic Reserve, on the Summit Road near Hilltop, was named in their honour, after their gifting it to the Wairewa County Council in 1941, and is home to what has been said to be to be one of the Peninsula’s oldest trees with a whopping girth of 8.5 metres – a tōtara estimated by one claim to be 2000 years old!
Nestled in a beautiful catchment head and gully of Jurassic-like landscape, the Wairewa covenants give a glimpse into the Peninsula’s past – and thanks to families like the Lathams, thriving biodiverse landscapes will continue to be a part of the Peninsula’s future.