A globe-trotting grandma uses her love for horses to help those struggling to be accepted in the mainstream world. Words: Bette flagler; Photos: Nicola Edmonds

ROSLEIN WILKES CREDITS horses with saving her life. Five months after losing her husband Rod to melanoma in 1994, her daughter Rosemary encouraged her to answer a call for volunteers put out by the Blenheim branch of the New Zealand Riding for the Disabled Association (RDA). Roslein didn’t know anything about RDA but went along because she liked horses. And it gave her a new focus, she says. It got her out of the house.

If the horses really did help her survive the death of her spouse, then she came to that lifeline honestly. When Roslein was 13 her mother, aged 35, died of liver cancer, leaving a 40-year-old widower with six children. Roslein was the eldest, the youngest was just two and the family lived on Galteemore, an Arabian stud farm in Marlborough’s Awatere Valley. The kids spent after-school hours on horseback, riding the paddocks with their father. It was the horses that held that young family together.

Now, what started as a childhood way of life and came back to rescue a grieving woman has taken this mother of six and grandmother of 14 around the world. It has given her a vocation that led to her winning a Rotary Paul Harris Medal and being made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit. And it has paved the way for her to become one of the world’s most highly regarded experts on equestrian sports for the intellectually disabled.

Scientists and engineers throughout New Zealand are working towards a more sustainable future. Words by Bette Flagler. Photographs: Graeme mitchelt anyon/photo new zealand; g prentice/istockphoto

Planning contest

The Sustainable Habitat Challenge (SHAC), an initiative of Otago Polytechnic, is bringing representatives from just about all our tertiary institutions together. This collaborative project was launched in late 2008 and challenges teams to design and build sustainable housing in their local communities. Ten teams took up the dare to develop low-energy and low-resource-consuming housing. The winner will be announced at the SHAC symposium in Dunedin on 19 to 21 November. www.shac.org.nz

Better wine through waste

Shells from mussel farms and glass from kerbside recycling are being tried as reflective mulches in vineyards through projects at Lincoln University’s Centre for Viticulture and Oenology. The mulches are intended to create a vineyard microclimate by increasing the amount of light that penetrates the grape canopy. The mussel-shell project is being run in collaboration with Neudorf Vineyards in Nelson and has been under way for four vintages. Although grape maturity, Brix, acidity and skin colour have not shown consistent differences compared to the control vines, perceived qualities such as mouth feel, complexity and smoothness have. Using crushed glass as mulch was a TerraNova initiative and is being run at Sandihurst Vineyard in Canterbury. The results there include better quality, yield and water retention, improved weed suppression and an increased temperature at bud height – and that can make a real difference when unexpected spring frosts come.

In our last e-newsletter editor Kate Coughlan wondered if school holidays should be held in February and March - the hot months - with only a short break for Christmas and New Year. This seemed to strike a chord, and we received many letters on the subject - thank you very much! We love receiving emails and letters, read them all and try to publish as many as possible.

Thank you to New World - and to you our readers. Drop us a line at news@nzlifeandleisure.co.nz and if you'd like to sign up to our e-newsletter, click on the link at the bottom left of this website.

February, the new January

Hi Kate (very informal because I feel like I know you),
 
Couldn't agree more regarding the summer holidays. The weather would be far kinder to the whole family in February. We would have a chance to recover financially from Christmas and work colleagues wouldn't be fighting for the same annual leave each year.
 
Keep up the great work and thank you for creating something so refreshingly Kiwi.
 
I take great pride in forwarding (reluctantly at times) my copy to a busy Kiwi living in Seattle. It is a true highlight for him.
 
Take care and keep fighting the 'holiday change cause'.

Totally supportive.
 
Bex

THIS TOUGH YEAR, personally and in business, has left few families untouched. With heartfelt relief we head into summer and our harvest. We have Christmas to look forward to as well as holidays and warmer weather. The plan is to keep life simple and hold family close.