Volunteers keep the Otago Community Hospice gardens looking good year-round, says Gillian Vine.
Last week was Hospice Awareness Week, an opportunity to focus on the sterling work done in caring for patients, as well as raising funds to enable the highest possible standards to be maintained.
Volunteers have always played their part at the Otago Community Hospice and the good-looking grounds at the Dunedin facility owe much to people who donate their time and expertise to maintain the garden.
Initial layout and planting at the purpose-built North Rd premises was undertaken by a Dunedin garden centre, which looked after the grounds for a year after the hospice opened early in 2002.
Volunteers, mainly from the Dunedin Garden Club, then took over part of the work, while commercial company Crewcut is contracted to do the rest.
Mike Smith, of Crewcut, has been working at the hospice for three years.
His twice-weekly visits include mowing lawns, trimming hedges and edges, and taking responsibility for maintaining the shaped bushes beside the Memorial Walkway that runs alongside Lindsay Creek.
''I always like the place looking tidy,'' he says.
Elsewhere, much of the regular weeding and trimming is done by a group of volunteers who turn up month after month, while some help comes in short bursts from businesses or service clubs.
For example, each ANZ employee spends one working day a year as a volunteer.
This year, David Frame, ANZ private banking services, opted to join the team of 11 people who last month waterblasted paths and walls at the hospice, and applied a mulch of chips to the garden.
Of the regular garden volunteers, most have been helping for a decade or more.
Dunedin Garden Club member Irene Vare has been involved ''12 or 13 years'' and Maureen Baty says she has been a helper for ''a very long time''.
Probably the longest-serving member of the group, though, is Heather Hore, who began working as a cleaner at the old hospice in George St some 20 years ago, then transferred to helping in the garden when the new complex was opened.
At that time, there was a garden-handyman employed but he left and was not replaced so, when she felt a bit more muscle was needed, she recruited her husband, Trevor.
When Mrs Vare began, work was concentrated on the strip alongside North Rd,''pulling out poor, dead rhododendrons'' for, as Mrs Hore explains,''The soil here just wasn't rhododendron country''.
A service club replanted the area with ''more suitable plants and they've just flourished'' in the poorly drained soil, she says, pointing to cabbage trees, flaxes, pittosporums, hebes, kowhai, pieris and viburnums which now pack the borders and give year-round colour.
Viburnums flower for months; the surviving rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias bloom from early winter; spring sees the flowering cherries strutting their stuff, while a bank of white Carpet Roses lights up the front entrance for months, although it is at its best in summer.
In autumn, the flowering cherries have another splash, thanks to vibrant gold foliage, while the leaves of deciduous viburnum turn a rich red.
The volunteers often bring plants from their own gardens, particularly for the picking garden which provides flowers and foliage for vases or on patients' meal trays. The work never ceases.
''We come at least once a month, according to the weather and what needs doing,'' Mrs Vare says.
Want to help?
The Otago Community Hospice always has need of volunteers, so if you would like to discuss how you can help, contact volunteer co-ordinator Raewyn Webster, phone 473-6005.
