Prestigious Loder Cup conservation award for writer Philip Simpson
2009 winner of the Loder Cup, the premier award for flora conservation in New Zealand, Philip Simpson. Photo: Neil Wilson.
Local botanist and author Philip Simpson has had a very rewarding year. In June he won the $100,000 Creative New Zealand Michael King writer’s fellowship, and last week it was announced that he is the 2009 winner of the Loder Cup, the premier award for flora conservation in New Zealand.
The cup, first awarded in 1926, “encourages and honours New Zealanders who work to investigate, promote, retain and cherish our indigenous flora”.
Philip will receive the cup next month at a special ceremony in Nelson during Conservation Week.
The Nelson Marlborough Conservation Board nominated Philip for the Loder Cup. Former board chairperson Ropata Taylor said he was “absolutely thrilled” with Philip’s win.
“When I first met Philip through the conservation board I was very, very impressed with his broad knowledge and his willingness to share it with others,” said Ropata. “He’s an inspirational character, particularly about the things he’s passionate about. He’s made a considerable contribution to the Top of the South and to the environment generally.”
Philip’s whole career has been devoted to trees in one way or another. In 1990 he was founding trustee of Project Crimson, the movement dedicated to the preservation of rātā and pōhutukawa. His earlier books, Dancing Leaves (about the cabbage tree) and New Zealand’s Iron-Hearted Trees (about pōhutukawa and rātā) were very successful with the general reading public. They differed from standard botanical books because they provided detailed scientific knowledge that took account of the cultural significance of their subjects while remaining accessible to everyday readers. Dancing Leaves won the environment section of the Montana Book of the Year awards in 2001 and New Zealand’s Iron-Hearted Trees won the same award in 2006. It also won the supreme award for non-fiction that year.
For the past 20 years or so Philip has also been involved in a wide range of projects involving tree-planting, plant identification and site rehabilitation. In the 1980s he participated in a project called Whakaruruhau, a marae-based project during which he helped to plant 1000 tōtara at the late Maori Queen’s Maketu marae at Kawhia. More recently he has been involved with the Marlborough District Council in a programme devoted to the identification and conservation of significant plants on private land.
One of his current roles in our community is as consultant botanist on the rehabilitation of Golden Bay Dolomite’s quarry at Mount Burnett. “Full marks to Merv Solly,” he said. “He’s restoring the land there once it’s been quarried. We built this country by extracting resources and just moving on, but that’s an obsolete model now. If you extract something from the land you’ve got to restore it. There are some very significant plants that are found only on Mt Burnett. The rehabilitation project is going really well.” LODER CUP page 2
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Philip says that his career as a writer developed almost accidentally.
“I happen to have stumbled into something that I feel I can succeed at. I like doing it and people seem to like what I write,” he said. “Publishers like my books too, because people want to buy them. I’ve been writing for a decade and now I’ve suddenly been given a fellowship that turns me into a professional writer. The title fits OK but it throws up a challenge. There’s a serious expectation that a book will appear in two years and the style I favour means that it has to be a comprehensive book.
“I like the idea of my books being part of a conservation message. Everybody says they love pōhutukawa and rātā; they say the same about cabbage trees and tōtara. The whole point of my writing is to gently make people aware of the significance of these trees so they’re more interested in conserving them. What really matters is that people benefit from the message. All my working life I’ve tried to pass on the conservation message. It baffles me that so much of botanical science used to be so esoteric. It didn’t translate to doing things on the ground.”
Philip has just finished pruning the grapevines in the Limestone Bay vineyard he owns with his wife Wendy Parr. The five weeks’ solid work has given him plenty of opportunity to think about how the new book might take shape. He sees the book about the tōtara as a natural companion to his earlier works because, like the pōhutukawa, rātā and cabbage tree, the tōtara is an important part of our human landscape, it has “a message” and an important future.
“It was a tāonga to the tangata whenua, it has a great botanical story to tell and it became important to Pakeha New Zealanders as a timber tree,” he said. “In the future the tōtara could become a sustainable source of durable timber. I can see a time when we might be forward-thinking enough to start plantations of tōtara so that people a couple of hundred years down the track have a sustainable resource to harvest.”
There is no missing the passion in the voice of Golden Bay’s Loder Cup-winning “tree man” and award-winning author. The tōtara book will be another beauty.
Neil Wilson
