NZ visual diary - entry 91

forest light - Dingle Dell Reserve

Among the many ways in which New Zealand is very British is its love of urban reserves and the 'bush walk' that reserves afford the city dweller.

My wife and I were first introduced to this (very British) sylvan romance in urban spaces during our week-long sojourn in Harare (Zimbabwe) before we moved to the rural township of Murewa to begin our two-year stint in 1982 as secondary schools teachers. Parks in Harare (Zimbabwe's capitol city) were seemingly ubiquitous, prompting our invention of a little game: guess the number of steps we would have to take before we landed at the entrance to the next city park.

Dingle Dell Reserve is the eponymous park on Dingle Dell Road in St Heliers, an eastern suburb of Auckland at the mouth of the Tamaki Estuary. Although modest in overall size, the reserve is a lovely collection of walking paths across stream and through dense forest, including an old growth stand of Kauri trees, a tree described by the NZ Department of Conservation as "among the world's mightiest trees, growing to over 50 m tall, with trunk girths up to 16 m, and living for over 2,000 years."

My image is a modest homage to the light and look of this gem of an urban bush park.