Top NZ awards for design work

 

By Nigel Benson on Sat, 11 Aug 2012, Otago Daily Times, Dunedin

 

Pukerau Nursery is celebrating its haul of wins at the Landscape New Zealand Landscapes of Distinction Awards on Saturday night. Team members (rear, from left) Peter Salmond, Lisa Bosshard and Arne Cleland joined Longford Kindergarten pupils to try out one of the activities in the award-winning garden the nursery designed, planted and built for the kindergarten.

 

You have to do the groundwork if you want to win gold. Dunedin landscape designer Lisa Bosshard won two gold awards and a silver at the Landscaping New Zealand Landscapes of Distinction Awards announced in Hamilton last week.

 

The designer, who works for Pukerau Nursery in Gore, won gold in the small project (under $40,000) and landscape design categories and silver in landscape construction for her Longford Kindergarten design in Gore.

 

"I'm absolutely thrilled," Ms Bosshard said."The brief was to design an outdoor play space which could provide an environment reminiscent of the forests, beaches, rivers and wasteland that children of previous generations had access to.

 

"I think a lot of children today are missing out on the freedom we had; going into the bush and running around in paddocks, collecting blackberries, or exploring the vacant lot next door." The design incorporated local threatened species of skink, gecko, birds and plants.

"It's a small space where children are spending a lot of their week and I hope they get the experiences we did. It's great for them to learn about conservation at an early age," Ms Bosshard said.

 

Longford is the first of 19 Kindergartens South playgrounds that are being remodelled by Pukerau Nursery.

The robust design and planting at the kindergarten gave children the opportunity to get their hands dirty and explore, Landscaping New Zealand president Adam Pollard said.

 

The two-yearly awards recognise excellence in landscape design, construction and maintenance.

Dunedin company Design and Garden Landscapes also won three silver and two bronze medals in the large project (over $40,000) category.

 

 

 

Encouraging backyard exploration

 

By Rosemarie Smith, 3 June 2010, Southland Times, Invercargill

There's a wee quiet revolution under way in the kindergartens of Southland, one that will be loudly applauded by all those who think children should be encouraged to explore, climb trees, dig holes, build huts and learn about the plants and animals of the environment in which they live.

 

The change has begun at Gore's new Longford kindergarten, and is set to spread soon to Bluff and Riverton, then ultimately to all southern kindergartens.

 

It's a turning away from plastic-fantastic bought play materials, providing instead a play-learning environment emphasising natural materials, a notion familiar to older generations who had fewer bought toys and spent a lot of time in outdoor play.

 

This is not strictly a garden story, as the concept put into practice Longford is inclusive, expressed indoors as well as out. In fact, it's hard to make the distinction as the campus is designed for activity to flow easily across a sheltered veranda and decking between the building and the grounds.

 

The direction came from Kindergarten South general manager Lynley Henderson, who observed first-hand the growing trend to natural play in Europe. In Germany, some forest kindergartens take the idea so far as to have no building at all, just a gypsy caravan forest base, she reports.

 

Arne Cleland's Pukerau Nursery team took up her brief, and it wasn't a hard task if you just thought what it was like to be a child, says designer Lisa Bosshard. Apart from the New Zealand theme, and practical safety requirements, she wanted areas of mystery, catering for quiet children as well as the more boisterous, encouraging exploration and discovery.

 

The site has been shaped into gentle humps and hollows and, apart from a lawn for running space, is thickly planted with hardy natives, low-growing grasses, tussock, flax, astellia, libertia and hebe, all bedded down in bark chip, hardily resistant to the trampling of little feet.

While the plants are still small, and mid-winter is not the easiest time to capture children's joyous engagement with their play space, the enticement to explore is apparent.