In 1987, New Zealand told everyone to kill gorse—but one botanist refused and let the weed take over his farm. Hugh Wilson saw the invasive plant as a nursery for native forest, a theory that left neighbors calling him a fool.
In 1987, a botanist named Hugh Wilson bought a degraded hillside farm on New Zealand’s Banks Peninsula and announced a plan that puzzled his neighbors. The land was covered in gorse, an invasive weed that farmers across the country had long fought with spraying, burning, and bulldozing. Wilson proposed the opposite: he would leave the gorse standing and allow it to act as a nursery for native fore…