When Yvonne Laukens was deciding what career to embark on as a young woman back in the Netherlands, she wanted plants, gardens and agriculture.
However her mother advised her to do some training as a nurse, because everyone in the Netherlands was into agriculture and the market was saturated.
“In the Netherlands when you are at primary school you get an allotment, a school garden.
“Everyone back home is into gardening and agriculture; it is part of it.”
In 1991 she packed her bags to travel all the way to Wānaka.
“I arrived in Wānaka and took a paragliding lesson at the front of Mt Iron and my husband was the teacher — I moved in quickly and I am still here.”
She and Richard Van Nieuwkoop own a property at the bottom of Mt Iron, which has a garden full of native trees, and birds.
She never stopped being that aspirational gardener, she said.
When she arrived in Wānaka, nursing jobs were few and far between, because the then tiny population of about 2000 did not warrant it.
So she took up not one job, but four, working at Elmslie house, for the IHC, in special education and at Relishes Cafe.
After a time, she could still feel the call of nature, so when a job came up at Mitre 10’s gardening department in 2005, she jumped at the opportunity.
In August she marked 20 years with the team. Five of those have been at the Three Parks Mitre 10, which was celebrating its fifth birthday on November 20 with cake and five days of festivities.
Asked why she never went back to nursing, Mrs Laukens said she loved working with plants and people.
“I thought this is what I really want to do, and I learnt so much.
“In those days we did everything ourselves. There was no internet, so we did everything by hand and read up on plants through books.”
The 59-year-old had spent the longest on the shop floor among her Mitre 10 colleagues and that was because she loved it.
One of her favourite parts of the job was advising first-time gardeners on how to set up.
“I hate to say it, but people have mentioned ‘gardening guru’, and I really enjoy it.
“Wānaka people are very keen gardeners. The Northlakes, the Longviews, the young families, they are all gardening.
“All the generations down here are gardeners.
She said many would come to her with their gardening queries and the entire team in the department.
“They ask me questions and they come with leaves to show me the problem.
“It is really nice to set young couples up and they succeed,” she said.
Google and AI answers were not always the right ones; in fact they were more often focused on overseas seasons and weather patterns, she said.
Mrs Laukens also did talks for the Wānaka Garden Club and found it hard to stop talking.
When she reminisced on riding the back of her grandfather’s bicycle with him in the Netherlands, carrying plants to his allotment where they would garden, she knew she had made the right decision to stick with her green-fingered career.
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