🌿 Using Our Problem as the Solution: How We’re Harnessing Gorse to Regenerate Our Land
- Helen Harris
- Oct 12
- 3 min read
If you’ve ever tried to regenerate land in Aotearoa, you’ll know that gorse can feel like both a curse and a constant battle. It grows fast, spreads faster, and those prickly thickets seem determined to take over any open patch of soil.
But what if the problem isn’t really the problem?
In permaculture, there’s a saying we love: “The problem is the solution.” It means that by looking at challenges differently, we can find their hidden value — and that’s exactly what we’re doing with gorse here at Khemeia Valley.
🌱 Why We’re Letting Gorse Help Us
After years of watching gorse reclaim our hillsides, we realised something important — it was actually helping. Beneath its spiky exterior, gorse plays several key roles in ecosystem restoration:
🌾 Nitrogen Fixing: Gorse enriches the soil naturally, providing essential nutrients that young native seedlings need to thrive.
🚶♀️ Protecting the Soil: Gorse thrives in compacted, tired soils, and its prickly nature naturally keeps people and animals away. This protection helps prevent further compaction, allowing the soil life beneath to rebuild undisturbed.
🌧 Preventing Erosion: Those deep roots hold the hillside together (and we have an abundance of hills), protecting bare earth from washing away in heavy rain.
🐝 Supporting Pollinators: Bees love its bright yellow flowers — and any boost for our pollinators is a win for the whole ecosystem.
🌳 Acting as a Nursery: Once native seedlings grow tall enough to reach the sunlight, they begin to shade out the gorse — which then naturally dies back, leaving behind healthy, fertile soil.
We’ve even found a few creative uses for it too. The flowers can be dried, used for natural dyeing, or even turned into wine. Helen dries them for her Gardeners Soap, where they add both beauty and a gentle exfoliant — another reminder that nature never really wastes anything.
🌼 The Challenges Are Real
Of course, gorse isn’t all sunshine and blossoms. It’s prickly, stubborn, and spreads fast — which means it can easily make access and intentional planting difficult if left unmanaged. While it does a wonderful job protecting and preparing the soil, its dense thickets can be tough to work through when it’s time to introduce new plantings.
We keep a close eye on its growth, creating small openings and pathways to weave in native seedlings where the time and conditions are right. Over time, those natives begin to rise above the gorse canopy, naturally taking the lead as the gorse recedes.
It takes patience (and a fair bit of trust), but nature always finds her rhythm — and our job is simply to support her process.
🌳 Inspired by Regeneration
Our approach was inspired by the incredible story of Hinewai Reserve, featured in Fools & Dreamers: Regenerating a Native Forest by Happen Films. There, gorse was allowed to play its role — acting as a nurse crop that sheltered native seedlings until the forest could reclaim the land.
Seeing that success gave us the confidence to work with nature, not against her.
💚 Trusting the Process
It’s not always easy to sit back and watch gorse thrive — especially when it looks like it’s taking over. But now, we can see the first native seedlings pushing through: kānuka, mānuka, māhoe, tōtara, and other pioneers beginning their quiet takeover.
The land knows how to heal herself.
It helps that we have established native bush on our property, which means the gorse-covered areas hold a natural seed bank — and we’re starting to see it come to life.
The gorse is doing its job.
Regeneration isn’t always tidy — sometimes it’s wild, tangled, and golden with thorns.
But look a little closer, and you’ll see the promise of a new forest quietly awakening beneath it.
Comments