Tōtora Park & The Botanical Gardens Reflection

Tōtora park

On the 30th of July I visited Tōtora Park for my launch project on Kaitiakitanga.

The whole morning and middle block I was dragging my legs through its tight muddy forest, sometimes hiking up and down steep stairs and hills throughout my agonising journey to find plants, birds, basically nature in general using an app called ‘Seek’ to scan all the stuff I was supposed to look for; the app instructs you to focus your camera on something of nature so that that it can identify the species and the name of the object you took a photo of to inform you of it.

The entire trip lasted a long time and it sure was boring since all the Kāhu students had to travel in a super long line whilst walking constantly resulting with my legs being sore. We made a few stops along the way to scan plants, however, for me the Seek app couldn’t fully recognise the all greenery I was trying to scan and I swear we would only stop to scan plants for 30 seconds before moving again; I totally agree that’s enough time to get a few photos but at the time I strictly only used the scanning feature which would usually force you to stand still with your camera pointing at the plants for eternity and then not be able to recognise the thing you’re taking a photo of, my mistake was that I didn’t know you could select pictures from your own photo album. What I could’ve done was to take a photo of the plant with my default camera and then select it in the Seek app for it to get scanned which is WAY faster!

Unfortunately in the end I got absolutely no photos from Tōtora Park…

 

The Botanical Gardens

A few days after, I went to the Botanical Gardens on the 6th of August.

The Botanical Gardens was a way better experience, all the Kāhu students were split into small groups with one guardian in each one so the groups don’t muck around or in case there’s an emergency which was a terrific idea because if we were to travel in a big humongous group it would be too crowded to scan your plants since other people would be trying to scan it too, second, strangers wouldn’t be able to walk through us if we were at a certain place taking pictures where there would be tons of kids standing in the middle of nowhere in summary, crowding the walkways.

This time I actually took photos, LOADS of photos in fact as my group stopped for a good while everytime we took our photos plus, that was then I realised the whole “Oh my gosh I can select already taken photos from my photo album!”. I found lots of plant species that day.

The Botanical Gardens resembles a park, it’s clean, tidy, beautiful and comforting but it still was one hell of a walking trip.

(Names according to the Seek app)

Leopard-plant

Chinese Fringe Flower

(.                                  Japanese Camellia
(.                                    Saucer Magnolia

What was different about the Botanical Gardens & Tōtora park?

Viewing it from a physical perspective I think Tōtora Park has a pretty nice scenery despite the fact it’s just nature itself just existing, they’re not plotted in specific places like the Botanical Gardens have their plants. Although, since Tōtora Park tries to make itself as natural as possible it doesn’t have railings for some of their tall stairs which without it I think you could slip easily especially when it’s pouring rain. Tōtora Park also has its walking paths entirely made of mud and dirt making it difficult to walk on when it’s sloppy and wet after or during rainfalls unlike the Botanical Gardens where it usually has concrete, cobblestone, etc for their pathways so you’ll be slip-free when exploring their gardens. Lastly, from what I’ve seen, Tōtora Park tends to have a few more bits of rubbish in their area even though they have plenty of trash cans around. On the other hand, the Botanical Gardens barely has rubbish lying around, maybe because they hire people to clean it up or because people care for it more.

What is Kaitiakitanga and how is this related to it?

Kaitiakitanga is the Māori term for guardians of the sky, sea, land, or to put it simply, the environment. The actions of protecting and caring for our environment is Kaitiakitanga itself. Tōtora Park and the Botanical gardens are both related to this subject because they both look after their natural surroundings very well and have an environment filled with plants, trees and flowers that they take care of.