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New Year Honours: Aunty's Garden founder transforms Hastings marae 30 Dec, 2020 04:00 PM 2 minutes to read Arohanui Lawrence of Hastings has been awarded a Queen's Service Medal for services to Māori and sustainable food production for her Aunty's Garden initiative at Waipatu Marae. Lawrence, 74, established the community garden as it is today back in 2010, with the public free to browse and pick produce for a small koha. An avid gardener her whole life, she said she first started out following her father, who grew tomatoes and peas for Wattie's in the 1960s. "I loved doing...

She is the face and voice of Aunty's Garden, which blossomed in 2003 when Lawrence became inspired by traditions of sharing surplus produce between marae. She established a community garden at Waipatu Marae in Hastings. “I asked my cousin if I could use the land next to marae for a garden, and they said yes. So I said to my husband, ‘right get the tractor out’ and then it just went from there,” she recalled. “We just planted things in long rows to start off with. Then in 2009 John Key came to give us some funding. It wasn't much, but the next round we got was from the Hawke's Bay ...