‘Father of gardening' puts away his trowel
Dunedin's "father of gardening" is hanging up his gloves after almost 50 years.
Nichol's Garden Centre Dunedin senior shop assistant Davie Dijker, 65, is retiring after working as a shop assistant in gardening shops for 48 years.
Mr Dijker said it felt "a bit weird" to be retiring.
"I think I'm going to miss the people after seeing all the things on Facebook."
A post on Facebook about Mr Dijker's retirement had attracted more than 100 tributes in the comment section appreciating his work.
He said he knew a lot of people and it made a difference in his role.
He had served some customers for more than 40 years.
"A lot of them are my friends.
"People remember me from back when I was at Arthur Barnett and that was over 30 years ago.
"That gives me a bit of a buzz."
He loved solving people's gardening problems and was referred to as "Dunedin's favourite father of gardening".
People often showed him photos of their successes gardening using his tips.
Every now and then there were photos of their disasters as well.
Mr Dijker said not much had changed with gardening in all the years he had worked in the industry except there was a lot more variety in plants these days.
He said gardening was in his genes because his father was Dutch.
He got his first taste of it doing horticulture at school at Taieri College and started a job at Arthur Barnett's garden shop in George St when he was just 17 years old.
Mr Dijker said he had never wanted to do anything else.
"I find gardening quite relaxing."
Mr Dijker said he loved planting vegetables, especially potatoes.
He was looking forward to helping people in their gardens, fishing and offering his services to the Dunedin City Council to maintain its walking tracks after retirement.
"I want to put something back in the community."
His last day at Nichol's will be on Wednesday.
mark.john@odt.co.nz
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NZ Herald
19 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Aaron Smale: Bill, Will and talkback trash
Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech. Bookbinder Bill Tito treats Shakespeare like a taonga, but receives racism and bigotry in return. Photo / Aaron Smale In a past life, Mana magazine editor Derek Fox asked me to take a photo of the bookbinder Bill Tito. Derek had written a human interest piece on a lovely man who came to the big city and landed an apprenticeship as a bookbinder, a master craft he has practised ever since. He's nearly 80. Bill is not only a lovely man but also interested in everything, and he had built a marketing style that revolved around pithy rhymes and his own natural charisma and charm. One of his catchlines was, 'Don't despair, think repair.' Books are one of my indulgences and stepping into Bill's workshop was to enter a wonderland of history and craftsmanship. It was filled with old and severely worn titles people had treasured over generations and couldn't bear to get rid of. Many were copies of The Bible the size of a modest doorstep. One was tiny and could fit into the palm of your hand. But it didn't matter – Bill would lovingly restore them all. Many others were editions of Shakespeare's works, also heirlooms that he restored to their former glory. In a recent radio ad, he referred to Shakespeare as England's kaumātua. That sounds to me like an expression of the utmost respect, which was how Bill intended it. Kaumātua can mean elder, but it's more than that. It encapsulates wisdom and reverence. It's a different meaning to rangatira, or chief/leader, but the two terms can overlap considerably. It was too much for some listeners to Newstalk ZB, where Bill was the target of racist vitriol in letter and by phone from mostly anonymous dickheads. There were insults about Māori literacy and just general racist nastiness. (Actually, in the 19th century, many Māori were more literate than many Pākehā getting off the boat, who weren't exactly speaking Shakespearean English, while some iwi had their own printing presses.) One woman accused Bill of virtue signalling. I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have a clue what she was on about – he doesn't use email, let alone Facebook. But it's clear from her letter that this woman is a white supremacist, and a gutless one at that. She wasn't the only one. Suffice to say, Bill Tito was baffled and hurt. He does not deserve that kind of rubbish. Some Pākehā have a notion that everyone from the land of their forebears lived in castles and sat around reading Shakespeare all day, making them direct heirs and guardians to high culture and civilisation. The more likely history is that they're descended from illiterate peasants who left a shithole of a place in the hope of something better on the other side of the world. One of my first Pākehā ancestors to land here was a kid who, with his family, left County Monaghan in Ireland barely a generation after the famine and arrived here in the middle of the Land Wars. He was illiterate and spoke Gaelic. Within one generation, he and his sons owned several farms on confiscated land. Their something better came at someone else's expense. In his day, Shakespeare was entertainment mainly for the illiterate lower classes; his works didn't become canonised and revered as a high point in English literature until some time after his death. Only then did they become objects of status for upper-class snobs (and colonial wannabes). One of the strengths of the English language is that it's a mongrel of a thing. It's a mix of influences, including Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Celtic, Latin, French and German. Shakespeare ripped off narratives and characters and locations from other countries' histories all the time, including Italy and Denmark. Did the Italians tell him to cease and desist because he was sullying their high culture with lowbrow productions? Like all great literature, Shakespeare transcends his own time and place because he's dramatising the human condition, which is why his work has been produced in so many different ways. Leonardo DiCaprio featured in a version of Romeo and Juliet set amid a mob feud in a stylised Los Angeles. Do those who bitched at Bill Tito object to that? In 2012, the recreated Globe Theatre in London staged 37 performances of 37 Shakespeare plays by 37 theatre groups from around the world. One of those groups was Māori, Ngākau Toa, featuring Rawiri Paratene, one of our country's finest actors and a lover of Shakespeare. The costuming, language and performance were totally Māori and totally Shakespeare, and the Shakespeare aficionados viewing it were completely blown away by the intensity. Does that offend the sensibilities of ZB listeners? I reckon Old Will would be chuffed to be referred to as a kaumātua. And I also think Old Will would thank Old Bill Tito as a kaumātua and rangatira of his craft for preserving his works in physical form so lovingly.
Otago Daily Times
13-08-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Tributes flow for Kiwi sailing great
Peter Lester and sister Jill Ineson hoisting the America's Cup. Photo: Facebook Tributes have been flowing from around the country and the world for Lyttelton sailing icon Peter Lester – with America's Cup officials, the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron and Yachting New Zealand among them. Lester died on Friday after suffering a heart attack a week earlier. He was 70. He has also been remembered closer to home. Before Lester became an America's Cup tactician and popular sailing commentator, he learnt his craft on Lyttelton Harbour. As a teenager, Lester was part of the Christchurch Yacht Club and the Canterbury Yacht Motor Boat Club, where his family had long-standing ties. He would sail Z-class and local P-class dinghies built by his father, Gordon. Lester also attended West Lyttelton Primary School where he became a prefect. Naval Point Club sailing committee member Ross May was among those lucky enough to see Lester in his early sailing days, and got a glimpse of his future capabilities. 'He was a really dominant sailor in our area, way, way ahead of any of the kids around.' '(He was) one of those sort of people who had an innate talent,' May said. He and Lester would run into each other at various events and said he was always easy to talk to, down to earth and never forgot where he came from. 'To go from Lyttelton sporting level to being on the top of the world stage, I would have thought he must have had a fantastic life and that's well deserved, I think everyone would say that,' he said. The Naval Point Club honoured Lester at its Old Salts Lunch at noon on Tuesday with a minute's silence, and flew the flag at half mast. Members who sailed alongside him also exchanged stories and memories. Lester moved to Auckland in his early 20s after switching from a dinghy to a keelboat, where he soon won the OK Dinghy World Championship in 1977, putting himself on the map. He was named New Zealand yachtsman of the year in 1977 and would achieve the feat again in 1987 when he skippered Propaganda to an Admiral's Cup win. Lester went on to serve as tactician for the NZ Challenges in the 1988 America's Cup, coached the Spanish team in 1992, and was tactician again in 1995. He pivoted to broadcasting when TVNZ asked him to join the commentary team during the 1992 America's Cup campaign. From there, he built a 30-year long career in the industry, his voice becoming synonymous with major sailing events. Former Yachting New Zealand chief executive David Abercrombie described Lester as 'generous with his time' and 'a great storyteller'. 'Pete had a wonderful memory for detail and was never afraid to call it as he saw it,' he said. Lester is survived by his wife Susie, three sons, and grandchildren.
NZ Herald
09-08-2025
- NZ Herald
Advice: Why is my family avoiding me after I cut off contact with my father?
Q: My husband has a well-paid job at an elite university. We send our two kids to the day care there. The combined cost is more than my annual salary. Over drinks with acquaintances, one of them raised the issue of day care costs. Someone said they were 'sooo expensive,' and another compared them to college tuitions. So, I finally said the number we pay. But when I saw the shock on their faces, I instantly regretted it. I didn't tell them to show off. I just thought it was more real to say what day care actually costs. Thoughts? - Mum A: I know you didn't mean any harm. And in fact, if you had simply reported the cost of the university-affiliated day care – from an article in a newspaper, for instance – there may have been some head-shaking at the unfairness of our economic system, but it might not have felt so personal. What you did, inadvertently, was place yourself on one side of a dividing line: those who can afford, say, US$20,000 per child for day care and those who can't. Money is extremely efficient in creating lines like these – which is not an argument for avoiding the subject, only for raising it after consideration. Limited bandwidth for texting Q: We are in the middle of a medical emergency. Our young adult daughter needs an organ transplant immediately. Between travelling to be with her, consulting with doctors and planning her move before the transplant, we are at our limit. Everyone in our inner circle knows the story. Still, many of them send us texts about their news and travels. I am not one to ghost, but I can't summon the strength to answer anything other than 'How is she?' or 'How are you holding up?' Am I wrong not to respond to these texts? - Friend A: Of course not! You are the best judge of your emotional capacity – and right now, you seem to have reached it looking after your daughter and the needs of your family. Who knows why your friends are sending newsy texts? Maybe they think they will be a welcome distraction. Don't give it another thought for now. There will be time to circle back to them later. Take care of yourself and your daughter. The camera was candid, but I'm not smiling Q: A kind man I know posted candid photographs on his Facebook page from an event I attended recently. One photo of me is so awful it shocked me. The angle is poor, and I look like a hideous toad. I wish I could get the word out about candid shots and their power to hurt. If I tell him how bad his photograph makes me feel, maybe he will learn something. Should I? - Subject Judging photographs – like any art form – is a subjective business. You can't know how I will feel about a picture of me and vice versa. If you want the kind man to take down his photograph of you, ask him to. (I bet he will.) But I see no reason to tell him how horrible it made you feel. In this age of social media, it seems unrealistic to think that attendees of public events have approval rights over documentary photographs. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Written by: Philip Galanes ©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
