TOTARA BERRIES, glowing like tiny orange beacons in the morning mist, send a succulent signal to passing birds that breakfast is served. A plump native pigeon is already crunching into them in the treetop over our heads. Arthur Cowan picks one and offers it to me with thick farmer’s fingers, his twinkling blue eyes daring me to taste it. The conifer’s little fruit bursts in my mouth with an intense sweetness, followed by an unexpected sensation: a resinous turpentine taste that reminds me of home renovation.

Arthur is gathering berries from a grove of sturdy podocarp trees that are guaranteed never to face a chainsaw. The seed harvest is part of an ambitious project to protect, restore and expand remnants of the towering forest that once blanketed this King Country farmland, Arthur’s home for the past 87 years.

After a quarter of a century of help from a New Zealand organisation, the Queen Elizabeth II National Trust, Arthur is beginning to see—and hear—the results of his work. The totara, matai and rimu seeds he has collected are growing into trees to feed pigeons and other native birds, which all seem to find that turps aftertaste something to sing about. Fenced off from stock and peppered with traps and poison bait to control introduced pests, the bush is thriving. Notch by notch, Arthur’s efforts are turning up the volume of the dawn chorus.

Pointing to a bush-cloaked hillside rising steeply across the babbling Waipa River, Arthur tells me, “Years ago, it was easy to hunt deer there, the bush was so sparse. Now you wouldn’t be able to see an elephant in all those trees.”

It was his aging father who initially charged him to protect their farm’s patches of native bush. To do so, Arthur and his wife, Pat, considered gifting the land to the government as a reserve. Then, in 1978, they heard about a new way to protect it in perpetuity while retaining family ownership.

The Cowans were among the first farmers in the country to sign up as partners with the fledgling Queen Elizabeth II National Trust to register a protection agreement on their land’s title. “It fitted our needs perfectly,” says Arthur. “It was rather marvellous we could get our bush protected, just like my father wanted.”

Over the past 25 years, hundreds of other landowners have taken the same course as the Cowans. Each has agreed to a permanent open-space covenant for their special place, enacting conditions and prohibitions designed to keep the area in its natural state. More than 70,000 hectares of land is now protected for all time by some 1700 covenants. Most of the land is in lowland areas—a part of the country which is not strongly represented in government reserves and national parks, yet which originally contained the greatest diversity of species and which is most accessible to the majority of New Zealanders.

Botanist Brian Molloy, the QEII Trust’s regional representative for the South Island’s Mackenzie Country, describes the network of protected areas as “the people’s national park,” because each covenant is a partnership between the landowner and the trust, in which the landholder is the built-in ranger.

As the concept has matured, covenants have been registered to protect not just remnants of bush but also Maori rock art, dinosaur fossils, penguin nesting areas, swamps and even public access to a favourite shellfish beach. The diverse mosaic of covenants continues to fill in around the country, reflecting changing attitudes towards land.

“We’re moving out of the pioneer phase,” says Gordon Stephenson, the Waikato farmer who came up with the idea of the QEII Trust. “People are thinking more about sustaining the land than developing it. We’re now the only country in the world with a queue of farmers waiting to put a restrictive covenant on their land for no financial reason.”

If it isn’t money, what is it that has motivated so many New Zealanders to give up forever their rights to develop parts of their property? This is the question I set out to answer in my journey to a few of the special jewels in “the people’s national park.”