This ended up being one of the most straight-forward plant transporting days we have had.
It occurred to me that Noelene Wainwright’s 4WD might be available and she kindly obliged so Chris was able to drive all the plants down to the site.
Noelene said this wouldn’t have been possible if it had been wet.  Sue Gibbings turned up.  She is a very organised person and we had the plants counted and sorted in just over an hour.  Chris managed to dig  about 120 holes.  There were fewer plants than last year (approx 800 excluding the rejects). There were very few manuka.  The caretaker of Takapuna Intermediate told me that most of these plants died after he replaced the batteries on the automatic watering system and they turned out to be duds.  Manuka are vulnerable at the best of times and they didn’t enjoy not being watered for three days in a very hot school playground!