THREE STREAMS & KAURI GROVE

Three Streams features an unusual combination of native bush and specimen  trees, native and exotic, in three stream valleys  and ridges, on the Albany hill, North Auckland, just above the Albany village (343 SH 17).

Walkways provide easy access to the diversified vegetation, offering a visual and educational experience to young and old.

Three Streams received the Auckland Regional Council's Environmental Award for Stewardship in 2000.
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WANTED! -----   -volunteers for-

Discovering - Potting - Signage - toolkeeping

Track clearing - Weeding - Composting - MULCHING

Pruning-  Planting  -Stream Management

Website Editor  -Secretary – Treasurer- librarian

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

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REGENERATION AND REVEGETATION

This site has been developed and planted as an Arboretum  by John Hogan since 1969.  Old pine trees have been removed, and over 4000 young trees and shrubs added and cared for, including 600 young kauris.  There is now an identifiable range of ages and regeneration of native species. Nikaus enhance the stream banks. Kauri Grove is a newer adjoining reserve with a number of mature kauris.

TRANSFER OF OWNERSHIP

John, who is 93 in 2009, gifted the property to the QE11 National Trust in 1991. It was transferred to North Shore City Council in  2004 and is now the centrepiece of three Council reserves, extending from Hobson Rd. down to Lucas Creek. John continues to reside in the house he had built in 1978, tends the surrounding garden area  and provides information

WEBSITE HISTORY

This website, started in 2002,  has been added to at different intervals by several contributors. The updates will explain the differences you will observe in the present appearance of the vegetation and landscape, showing the historical and botanical development of the site. We will add more interesting features  enabling you to comment on your impressions, including comparisons with similar reserves or gardens elsewhere in New Zealand or overseas, and general ecological information, with links to other relevant websites.
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BIGGER OPPORTUNITIES: Our public gardens are called parks, be they yard-sized city flower beds or regions of protected forest.  The old conservation movements tried to fence off chunks of wilderness. They presumed, from experience, that humans were natural enemies of nature and would destroy it completely unless halted by a higher authority.

By the 1990s about 3.2per cent of the world's land was enclosed in national parks. But when traditional conservationists focus on saving the wilderness, they tend to overlook two bigger possibilities for saving the planet. The first larger opportunity lies simple in lowering our defenses against nature and reducing our efforts to suppress its regeneration.

For example, over the past century or so, the overgrazed grasslands of North and South America have been sprouting a new cover of tough, thorny, cow-resistant plants such as mesquite trees with cactus. As these hardy thickets of mesquite have spread, many landowners have undertaken a difficult and expensive war to suppress them.

 -The Possible Ecological Age, Brian Griffiths,2001.