Kaitiakitanga 

This Semester in kāhu, our theme is Kaitiakitanga/ Guardians of the galaxSea.

Kaitiakitanga simply means Guardian of the environment meaning, the sky, land and sea. With this in mind, we walked to Tōtora park and The Botanic Gardens with our iPads and used an app called Seek to help us identify things around us.

 

Tōtora Park

Walking in Tōtora park I noticed that the ground was very damp and the mud was quite slippery. I saw some really massive Tōtora trees and a big lot of stairs. The streams were quite murky and dark and were running quite slow and even some had rubbish. I could hear multiple birds in the trees and could hear the streams flowing below us as we were coming closer. I saw some really cool big leaves and sticks that had fallen or come from the trees.

 

Botanic Gardens

It was very quiet when walking around and we were mainly walking on smoother footpaths all throughout with multiple different gardens and plants. I saw where the puhinui stream continues and saw that it was quite clear and clean and was flowing quite fast. There is a stormwater pit that filters the toxic or dirty chemicals in the storm water and then flows the clean water to the stream leaving the toxins out. There were some really vibrant flowers I saw while looking around.

 

Comparison

In comparison I could see a big difference in the environment at botanic gardens compared to Tōtara park. The botanic gardens were much cleaner and there was a much bigger variety of plants than there was at Tōtora park. Tōtora park felt more ‘earthy’ with all the trees, vines and trails but botanic gardens felt much more like plant gardens. The stream was very different where at the gardens it was very clean and flowing quite fast but Tōtora park was much more murky and slow. This was very interesting to see because although they are the same stream connecting they looked completely different. Both of these places were fun to visit and I saw some really interesting things.