Natural Leaders

16/11/2025

Craig...would you know anything about this?

23/10/2025

How cool is this!

A Taupō family of six has walked the length of the country along the Te Araroa trail, homeschooling all the way, having never done an overnight hike before.

29/07/2025

Check out our latest bling. We just won the Rising Star Award for Upper Hutt at the WEllington Airport community awards. So proud of these kids!

13/05/2025

Can we feed the world without destroying it?! Rosario Dawson’s award-winning film The Need To GROW shows the SOLUTIONS — and the real stories of the game-changing innovators behind them.

10/05/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/14m7gGt5uV/
We are planting something more precious than diamonds

The universe is glittering with diamonds. But wood? That’s unheard of.

On planets like Uranus and Neptune, atmospheric pressure may squeeze carbon into diamond rain. In white dwarf stars rich in carbon, intense gravitational pressure can create entire diamond cores. Even in interstellar dust clouds, microscopic diamond grains have been detected. All it takes is carbon, pressure, and time – no life required.

But wood is different.

Wood is a complex biological material – a product of photosynthesis, built from cellulose, lignin, and water-transporting vascular systems evolved over hundreds of millions of years. It requires not just carbon, but a whole web of life-sustaining conditions: liquid water, sunlight, oxygen, and stable climates. These aren’t common ingredients in the universe. They’re signatures of a living, Earth-like planet.

Wood is a living structure, shaped by evolution. It grows in rings, responds to seasons, stores atmospheric carbon, and creates habitats. Its very presence hints at forests, at ecosystems, at a biosphere. As far as we know, no other planet has it.

So while diamonds may rain on alien worlds and lie buried in stellar remnants, wood tells a different story – not one of heat and pressure, but of life, time, and complexity.

👉See more space comics & infographics: www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/

10/05/2025

This. When a garden is so much more than just some food.

Send a message to learn more

10/05/2025

When we start judging people for not having enough food or struggling to make ends meet can we just consider this wee social science experiment.

10/05/2025

We met with the folks at Clyma Gardens and were told we could have a large section for the forest. We are meeting this Wednesday to speak with the team at Maidstone lntermediate to sort out where we can plant out our Food Forest at the school.

We posted our intent on the Upper Hutt Community page and had over 190 likes and about 60 people saying they were interested in helping out. So after our meeting we will start planning some syntropic agroforestry workshops with people so they can get a sense of how it all works and how we hope to fund it all.