Tree debris piled high on the Wilson family orchard after Cyclone Gabrielle. It bowled over apple trees. Photo: Lesley Wilson
You can't drive down Swamp Road with your car windows open. The putrid smell from silt smothering the orchards here is nauseating and as you drive you're hit by the greyness of it all.
Instead of lush green trees popping with apples ready to be picked, branches stick out from a sea of drying mud and drooping fences laced with onions look like bizarre art installations.
It's odd seeing big hay bales sitting wonkily among the vines. They should be together, neatly stacked.
Every few hundred metres, you pass a soggy mash of household contents on the verge - people's lives tipped out.
It's a week since Cyclone Gabrielle struck, flooding the fertile plains south of the Tutaekuri River west of Napier and sending a rushing sea of silt and forest debris into orchards and paddocks.
Lesley Wilson is checking over one of her orchards here to see whether any apples are salvageable.
The silt which flooded the land is drying and cracking now. It hit the bottom half of the trees so the tops may be OK, she told Country Life.
Another 12 hectares of orchard is a write-off, she says, after slash punched holes in the river's stop banks.
"It is metres and metres and metres high. It took out orchards ... just bowled them.
"It just wiped out the trees at ground level.
"It just bounced down the rivers like a pinball."
She knows it is forestry slash because of the saw marks on the trunks.
After a traumatic escape from the floodwaters and a worrying search for her team of Samoan orchard workers, Wilson has turned her mind to recovery.
Ensuring safe housing for her workers is top of the list.
"They are our family. We go and visit them in Samoa. They call me mum and they come back every year."
"It's a bit exhausting but we're getting there.
"The past couple of days I am feeling really, really positive. I know that sounds crazy because at the beginning we lost everything - all the houses, all the vehicles, all the machinery."
Everybody is just ticking along doing what they can when they can, she said.
In place of the orchard's damaged electronic tractors, old Massey Fergusons are being fixed up and friends have come out of the woodwork with vehicles that they've had sitting in sheds.
The Wilsons are staying with friends with "hot showers and hot coffee".
"Friends have sent clothing. I own a hairbrush and a toothbrush."
They have big gear coming in to clear up the slash and insurance assessors are visiting.
Having a team of family and friends with different strengths is a big help.
Silt drying and cracking at Lesley Wilson's orchard on Swamp Road in Hawkes Bay after Cyclone Gabrielle Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
"We're getting some plans in place and I think that's really important even if it's a small goal just to get a couple of things done that day."
Wilson has welcomed financial assistance committed by the government this week but reckons it will take $150,000 to $200,000 a hectare to remediate the sour land and replant.
"As a company or a family we've never taken anything from the government and we're going to be putting in for that.
"We're cleaning up other people's mess."
