Microforested
Words by Maia Ingoe (she/her)
I breathe in and inhale the smell of dampness and cold and rot. It’s a rich smell: full of growth, moistness, and winter after rainfall. The water seeps through the trees, through the fallen leaves coating the ground, the mulch forming underneath; slinks between the soil and the granules of stone and past all of the tiny critters chewing, munching, decomposing. It runs down into the deep reservoirs and buried rivers that run beneath suburbs. I step over the leaves and keep walking.
The lichens growing over white fence-posts thrive in dampness, as does the moss interwoven through the path. The fungi, yet to surface as mushrooms, thrive too—it will be their season soon. Me? I try not to slip on the wet concrete on my way down. I try to savour my submersion into the microforests of the city, yet, all too soon, I’m surfacing from beneath the tree’s canopy into city streets crammed with cars and buses streaming past. The smell from the microforest of the path starts to fade, and burning fuel fills my lungs instead.
I live in the hilly suburbs of Wellington. To get to the city, I have to criss-cross down the paths and shortcut between houses, down stone stairs next to a little river of gutter water. Crossing streets, bridges above me, through tunnels, over parks with wide, curated paths and lawns. Emerging from tree covered paths to the city bustle, dipping in and out between microforest, suburb, and CBD; between life-worlds on my journey down, down, down.
Wellington is unlike any city I know. I often think, ‘Who in their right mind decided to build a city here?’ Who plonked these houses between hills and crammed a capital into valleys, where the wind tunnels, and the rain chases you downhill, searching for rivers covered by concrete, searching for spaces between buildings?
No one chose this, exactly. When the New Zealand Company—famously capitalising colonists—arrived to what they’d decided would be Wellington, they had mapped out a gridlock city, sectioned off parcels of land, and sold it off without ever buying it themselves. They had never stepped foot here.
It was 1839, and on arrival, they were met by steep hills, deep valleys, and impenetrable bush. But they’d already sold the land—which was not theirs to begin with—to settlers, so they made do with this hilly city. They carved roads into valleys, tunnelled through hillsides, and built steps and winding paths. The hilly city was pedestrianised out of necessity—people only had their feet. Patches of native bush persisted between wooden homes—the mould and mildew found new, now domestic, places of inhabitation.
Colonisers also covered up the awa—the rivers and streams—sending them underneath the city, hiding the eels of the water from the sunlight.
It was the trend in the new, worldly colonist cities of the time to build a green belt. Thick strips of bush were left standing, wrapping around the guts of the city, holding it in, keeping it from sprawling outwards. The green belts were for the wealthy to peruse at their leisure, to breathe something of ‘wilderness’, without ever leaving their backyard. Wellington got a town belt, simply by luck of the trend, running a seal around the inner city and the outer suburbs.
Wellington’s inner town belt is grounded in greenery—tree roots retain our slippery streets through wet winters. The original town belt was more than 1000 acres and bent in a horseshoe shape around the city. It was an undivided green trailing, from the top of Matairangi to the Mount Albert ridge south of Newtown and Berhampore, up through Brooklyn, curving around Kelburn to the Botanic Gardens, and ending at Te Ahumairangi.
The town belt, like most of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, is stolen land. The Waitangi Tribunal report for the Port Nicholson Settlement Block—the area of Wellington’s colonisation—identified that the town belt area was taken illegally from Māori in 1841, without consent, consultation, or payment. The land was vested into the reserves for the city, and later passed into the hands of the Wellington City Council, becoming unavailable for treaty settlement to Taranaki Whānui ki te Upoko o te Ika.
Since its establishment in 1840, the town belt has been chopped up and divided with chunks repurposed for building. Victoria University’s Kelburn Campus is one of them. One-third of the land was used for purposes not originally intended, dividing the town belt into blocks of green thriving in the small spaces between the city, never further than a short walk away: the microforests.
The green spaces that interest me exist in the spaces in between the town belt. The trees covering paths from Garden Road to Glenmore Street. The moss-covered, winding stairs down to Kelburn Parade. The microforests next to Salamanca Road, following the City to Sea walkway. Wellington City is spoiled with green; stand anywhere with a view, and it’s easy to see the buildings lodged between nature. Unhindered by our human influence, it could keep growing around and above us, enclosing us in a forest-submerged cityscape. More than one-third of the central city’s public green space is not enclosed in pristine parks and gardens, but rather in roadside reserves, non-council areas, and slopes that cannot be maintained. We are never far from feral, untamed space.
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If you couldn’t already tell, these forest paths were playing on my mind. I knew I needed an expert, someone with a lifetime of knowledge, and I was pointed to the path of Ellen Blake.
Ellen works with Living Streets Aotearoa, and has been walking the paths of Wellington for much longer than I. Living Streets campaigns for walkability: that is, a city set up so people can easily walk to work, to amenities, to the supermarket, the doctors, to friends. Walking, she says, is for everyone: it’s free, and many people don’t have a choice but to walk. And Wellington’s paths and shortcuts are many. It comes back to the ill-planned colonisation, Ellen explains. Most people didn’t have any option but to walk in the 19th century, so building paths that carved a way through Wellington’s hillsides were a necessity.
Ellen met me on Kelburn Campus on a fine but cold day—one of those Wellington winter days where being outside is stomachable. We walked down Mount Street, past the cemetery on the left and the thin line of bush bordering the bank on Salamanca Road on the right. Turning down Salamanca Road, walking alongside the white fence posts bordering the footpath, to the stairs disappearing down into the microforest. A little yellow sign: City to Sea walkway. We turned and walked down it.
This part of the City to Sea walkway dips away from Salamanca Road and re-emerges on The Terrace. The leaf-covered steps and still-soggy ground soon ended, and the path was noticeable only by where it had been worn down by footsteps. We were surrounded by native trees; we had dipped into the bush, away from the bustle of the city and the road, into another world.
Down the bankside we went, inhaling the damp air and the smell of decomposition amongst the greenery. The sound of running water became louder, and we came to where the Kumutoto stream remerges briefly, for a breath of fresh air. This awa used to feed Kumutoto Pā, but since the 1870s, it has run through pipes from Karori, past Kelburn, and below the CBD to be released at the Whairepo Lagoon at the waterfront. Here, it tumbles out of the pipe, running across a drooping ledge of concrete to a small pool. The bank looks as if it has given way to the water, roots hang from the dirt, heavy and languished. Two sides of a fence line are separated by the dropped bank and the water. A line, a wire, a piece of rope runs between them. It’s not idyllic. The water seems as if it’s grasping for space in the air and sunshine. It feels trapped between these pipes, roads, and buildings.
Ellen and I continue our walk, emerging from the untamed forest path to something more curated: a concrete path and grass lawn. This is a park too—you can see it from the Salient office. We walk to the edge and look over the railing to see the motorway running underneath it, cars speeding through the Terrace Tunnel beneath us. Speakers linked up to the Kumutoto send the sound of running water into the tunnel.
This path, like many shortcuts in and out of the microforests growing between Wellington’s unmarked spaces, isn’t ‘walkable’. It’s overgrown and wild, the path is unmarked and unsealed. For a second, you dip below the city surface of Wellington. No one stays here for longer.
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The city’s green belt, and the microforests in between, are an opportunity for restoration and growth. They show us glimpses of natural ecosystems, places that live and grow alongside the environment we live with. Trails Wellington want to take advantage of this.
Trails Wellington, leveraging off investment from the likes of Xero’s founder, has become a joining force for community mountain biking, and more recently, commuter cycling groups. Matt Farrar, a trustee of Trails Wellington, ran me through their vision document: a bold outline for how the cities greenbelt’s can be leveraged for safer cycling paths that also support native regeneration. Their plan aims to connect with Paneke Pōneke (a plan for a city-wide cycling network, from Island Bay to Johnsonville) and grow the project from its current status. Traditional benefits of creating more mountain biking trails had always been economic, creating a new market for tourism. But with the “transformational movement” looking at commuter cycling, the potential benefits for physical and mental wellbeing, supporting climate action, and native regeneration, entered the picture.
“Mountain biking can go from being a recreational sport, [and] start being a legitimate way to get in and out of the city, to not use a car, over and above Paneke Pōneke.”
Wellington is already known as the “city of trails”, thanks to the uniqueness of its inner and outer greenbelt. Matt compares Wellington to Copenhagen, the city most renowned for its cyclability. Sixty-two percent of people commute by bike in Copenhagen, bracing average wind speeds of 24.5kmph and 9-degree weather. Wellington is often said to be too cold or too windy for cycling, but our average wind and temperature is similar to Copenhagen at 23.5kmph and 13 degrees. But Wellington one-ups them in one way: Copenhagen has 42m2 of greenspace per person, whereas Wellington has 207m2 of greenspace. That’s space that can be utilised for mutual human and environmental benefit, Matt says.
Working with world-class trail designers, Trails Wellington are looking at areas where trails can be built three metres wide, with “less than five degree steepness, all throughout the green belt, to enable commuting from the Eastern, Southern, Western and Northern suburbs.” This would make it easier for everyone to cycle in and out of greenspace on their commute—different to the roadside lanes promised in Paneke Pōneke.
Where Trails Wellington have built mountain biking trails through Waimapihi, Mākara Peak, and Matairangi, they’ve created a volunteer-force for native regeneration, planting trees for every metre of trail. At Waimapihi, 30,000 trees have been planted in the last ten years, and at Makara, over 50,000. This is a “regeneration success story”, says Farrar, of the native planting through Makara’s exotic forest and farmland.
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You may never think about the paths beneath your feet. While you’re struggling for breath climbing Mount Street to uni, you probably don’t think about the paths criss-crossing through the graveyard to Darwin Street. You probably won’t think of the fallen leaves, yet to turn to mulch, on the damp sidewalk. You won’t think about the lichen growing across the cold stone, climbing up the white-painted fences, separating the footpath from (what’s rather blandly known as) ‘greenspace’. All of these are parts of our city.
As we forge new, zero-carbon ways of urbanness, things like walking and cycling and simply noticing the surrounding nature has become more important. Wellington, in my mind, is unique, because it hasn’t banished the wild and native plants from its cityscape. They persist in between the industrial, covering streets and paths, in greenbelts and throughout microforests. The point of these things is how we can make our way through greenspace, revitalising how we understand a city, making a new path that is not so limited.
This, the greenbelts and microforests and footpaths, is the environment of Wellington, of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, of Pōneke. This is the grime on our boots and the rain on our fingertips. This is the kawakawa leaves and the agapanthus. It is all of it; encased in our criss-cross walk to the city. This is our opportunity.