Overlooking Wellington’s CBD, between the towering conifers of the town belt and a neat line of townhouses, lies the Innermost Gardens - one of city’s longest running community gardens. 

Over half a decade, a passionate team of volunteers have transformed what was once a bowling green into a vibrant food forest, prolific vegetable and herb garden and established orchard. 

Innermost Gardens was set up as an incorporated society in 2006, the now chairman Tim Packer is unsurprisingly one of the most hands-on participants on gardening days. I met Tim with both hands deep in the soil, pulling up weeds after a bountiful Spring harvest.

The guided tour through the garden begins at the orchard, which at first glance appears overgrown but teaming with life. Tim Packer’s background in permaculture has led him to a fascination with soil-healing legumes and weeds, knowledge he is now putting to great use in the orchard. He explains, “To some, this orchard might look overgrown with weeds but there is some experimental stuff going on in here.”

Tim has planted at least a dozen different purposeful plants for herbal ley including comfrey and clover, which condition the soil and act as bee attractants. “This soil was really quite anaerobic, yellow and very clay-like. But now it’s thick and organic and you can put a spade in here and you’ll find it’s just black.” 

Getting the orchard and garden to this stage, however, required substantial work. When the group first reclaimed this land for their garden, soil tests showed high levels of DDT, “There are a lot of toxins in bowling greens because they spray the shit out of them,” says Tim. “So we’ve gone through a long process of bioremediation with mushrooms and mycelium to detox the soil. In this case, we have a lot of mycorrhizal fungi, which basically disassemble things like DDT and break it down to its most primitive elements, so it becomes safe. It took about 18 months but now we’re toxin free.”

Tim underlines that everything that takes place in the garden is based on permaculture ethics and principles, “We don’t use sprays here and we lay a little bit of copper once in awhile, but that’s it really. We also do a lot of local, whole systems design to ensure we’re constantly improving the quality of this land over time.”

The team ask for volunteer help on the two gardening days a month and try to provide as many ways as possible for people to get involved and interested, “Our old motto is ‘community hands in the soil’. So it's just about getting involved in the garden. In that sense we provide a really low committal option, which is if you come along and spend a couple of hours, you take produce home.”

In the centre of the garden lies a community hall, which Innermost Garden sublets to yoga, meditation and theatre groups, “It gives us another income which allows us to be self-sustainable” says Tim. “Early on in our life, we leveraged off a lot of grants but now we’re one of the mature gardens and fortunately, there are a lot of community gardens starting up and we don’t want to take their grant money. The hall allows us to provide a small income to run the gardens.”

Tim says the goal now is on strengthening the ties between the garden and local community groups. A number of organisations now manage their own garden beds and bring members through the garden for learning and enjoyment, “For us, resilience is all about the more, the merrier. The more connections we have, the better off we’ll all be.” 

Tim says his individual focus is squarely on encouraging more people into the garden, “Connection to nature is so important and there are so many physical constructs that get in our way these days. There is scientific research that now shows that even just by putting your hands in the soil, it stirs up microbial activity that has an antidepressant effect on the body. Imagine if everybody had access to a garden. We’d all be a lot better off.” 

Amen.