I grew up in Halswell. This place [Ngā Puna Wai] is like my second home. I spend so much time here weeding and planting and walking the dogs and whatnot, all the planting I do here is sanctioned. I did start out guerrilla planting, I was working with a tree nursery and there were always random little native tree seedlings in the pots, it seemed a shame to get rid of them.

The first time I became interested in plants, it was a rainy day and I’d read all the sci fi and fantasy books on dad’s bookshelf. I decided to put my finger in a random spot – it was the Reader’s Digest Encyclopedia of Plants for Australian and New Zealand gardens.

It was the aesthetics that first caught me. Yes, my first real botanical interest was native plants, because you want to learn the plants of a place and what makes it special and unique.

My theoretical interests, okay. That’s where the weeds come in.

Once you learn what’s native and what’s not, it starts becoming very easy to get down and see the exotics, the weeds spreading and taking over. I don’t know how many hours I spent here trying to get rid of the things.

There’s not so much attention paid to weeds as there is to native ecosystems which makes sense. There’s a whole lot of low hanging fruit to be found if you spend your time looking in places other people don’t look, industrial zones, weedy revegetation plantings. I’ve learned to love the weeds enough that it doesn’t bother me when I go out elsewhere and see the things growing. It’s hard to explain.

there’s a bit of a tendency to try and control the big picture. if everybody just took direct action, no bureaucracy, if everybody took care of their local area, you would get results quite a bit quicker.

A question I ask everybody; Would you rather go into the future, or into the past?

It tells a lot about the way people think, people who look to the future are either hopeful or curious.

For me, I want to go, say, a thousand, or a million years into the future. I want to see how things have settled from the changes we’ve made. We’ve warmed the place, we’ve moved everything, everywhere. So it’s basically a reset of ecosystems all over.”

– ‘Weedy’ Will