🌿 Greening Taupō Day 2025 🌳

Greening Taupō Day 2025 – A Community Effort to Celebrate Arbor Day (and more!) 🌳

Greening Taupō Day 2025 marked our fifth annual event—and another incredible success. It was a powerful reminder of what we can achieve when our community comes together with a shared passion for the environment.

The highlight of the day for Greening Taupō was, of course, our Arbor Day planting, where 3,000 native plants found a new home in the ground thanks to an amazing team effort. Preparation started months in advance, and then the hard mahi kicked in a few days beforehand with the Taupō/Tūrangi DOC team along with Hutch, Andrew, and Aaron, who worked the days leading up to the event to get the site looking good and those 3,000 holes in the ground. Then the ever-reliable Wicked Weeders, with support from DOC, laid out all 3,000 plants and added vermicast from MyNoke (a whopping 7 tonnes, delivered by Double H2Go & Double H Haulage) into each hole to give the seedlings the best possible start. Taupō District Council followed up with truckloads of mulch to help look after the new plants.

The beautiful native plants were grown from eco-sourced local seed at Tongariro Corrections 🌳 and generously funded by Trees That Count, Contact Energy, and Hukafalls Jet — ngā mihi nui for making it all possible!

Despite a bit of weather, our community showed up in full force — tamariki, whānau, teachers, volunteers, and community groups. Together, we got every single plant in the ground, with muddy hands, big smiles, and a whole lot of aroha for the whenua.

🌱 But the planting was just one part of the celebration!

This year’s event featured over 50 organisations and businesses offering an incredible array of engaging, hands-on educational activities for tamariki and whānau. With kai, music, and so much to explore, the day has really grown into a festival of environmental education, a one-of-a-kind celebration for the central North Island.

To top it all off, our Greening Taupō Day Fundraising Raffle was a fantastic success, raising valuable funds to support environmental education and restoration mahi. Huge thanks to everyone who bought tickets and to our amazing local sponsors who donated such generous prizes — from skydives and family cruises to garden bundles and adventure activities. And congratulations to our lucky winners — Jenny, Catherine, and Nick!

💚 A heartfelt thank you to everyone involved — volunteers, sponsors, teachers, tamariki, and the many individuals and organisations who help bring this day to life. Your support helps keep Taupō green and thriving.

Here’s to another successful Greening Taupō Day in 2026 — and to many more to come!

👉 Check out the Greening Taupō Day website to see stories from past events and to visit our Partner Page — it’s packed with all the amazing people and groups who help make this event possible: www.greeningtaupoday.org.nz/our-partners