Freda Gerslov: Commercial flower grower, Soroptimist and Arts Council organiser

November 15th, 2010
By David Armstrong

After 12 years' service as one of the key workers of the Motueka Arts Council, Freda Gerslov is looking forward spending a bit more time on her favourite pursuits of walking, U3A, her eight grandchildren, and planning her final visit to England, her country of birth.

Freda resigned from her position as president of the Arts Council this year, saying the group which is behind so much of the work to make Motueka a place for artistic expression needed new blood and direction.

Now 76 years old, but still a strong 50-plus club walker and retaining a sharp intellect, has experienced both the hard work of setting up a significant land-based business and the pleasure (and sometimes also hard work) of collaborating with friends and like minds to promote arts in the district.

Freda was born and raised in Thirsk, a rural town in North Yorkshire about the size and feel of Motueka. She became a high school teacher in the Lakes District, mainly in geography and maths. She loved the area, particularly for its tramping and climbing the surrounding hills. After six years in the profession she saw an advertisement for a two-year teaching position in Wellington.

She still remembers sailing into Wellington Harbour after her long voyage. "It was a summer evening, very still, just beautiful. That was my first glimpse of New Zealand." A week later she and another teacher had a boating week in the Marlborough Sounds. "I'd come to paradise!" she says.

Talking with Freda, you get the feeling of her love of life, experiencing all that was on offer, seizing the moment and impulsively going off on little adventures around New Zealand. The school she was teaching at was "very English" and she was living in the boarding school with other recruited English teachers, but her eyes sparkle when she talks about the trips with many friends of a similar mind tenting and motor cabin camping around the country.

She just loved the friendliness of the people she met and the friends she made. For example, they went to Invercargill one time and visited for a cuppa a distant relative who had settled there. They ended up staying for a week. "That was just the sort of hospitality you got from rural New Zealand in those days. Now we're friends for life."

For two years she mixed teaching with touring, skiing and tramping. When her contract was up she briefly returned to the UK but came back for another teaching job here. She met and married John, a builder with Danish ancestry, and they worked in Lower Hutt and Hawke's Bay for a while.

In 1975 Freda and John decided they wanted to "get a bit of land and do something different". They had been to Takaka on holidays and had friends there, and they saw a commercial flower-growing business in Pah Street Motueka while holidaying, so they bought it. It had three glasshouses on an acre of land, mainly growing carnations.

They stayed there about nine years. An added interest in growing orchids meant they eventually ran out of room, so in 1986 they sold and began to develop a 10-acre paddock in Eden Road, Mariri. It was a larger operation, again led by carnations and orchids, eventually in three glasshouses.

It was a time of hard, physical work, initially living in the packing shed and a caravan. By this stage they were raising two children in their teenage years. (Now Freda has eight grandchildren, all in Christchurch.) Together they managed a "reasonable living" off the flowers, but the physical demands - and declining profitability of flowers - meant that in 1995 they sold the business.

In this later stage of their business days, Freda became national secretary of the NZ Floriculture Federation (an association of flower growers). There was a big group in the Nelson-Marlborough area, and a Nelson member became president and he said he wanted a secretary. "So in a mad moment I said I could do that," she says. "I didn't know how to use a computer, so I had to learn quite a lot quite quickly."

Her main interest in wider community activities was with the Soroptimists International, a kind of women's service group similar to Rotary. She became a member in her early days in Motueka, around 1976, and in the 30 years that the group operated they took on a wide variety of quite significant community projects as well as assisting with national Soroptimist projects in developing countries.

The group helped create Riding for the Disabled, and set up the Toy Library in Motueka before passing it on to the management group. They also founded and initially ran the popular Motueka Garden Trail, which is now one of the best known events on the local events calendar.

At various times over those years Freda took on administrative and official roles with both the local and the national body. But most she enjoyed the friendship, the fun and the sense of connectedness that the group provided.

She also recounts the pleasure and fun she's had singing in local choirs. She sang with the Greenwood Singers, under Faye Bolt's direction in the late 70s and 80s, then for over 15 years with St Thomas Church Choir, and more recently with the Combined Nelson, Motueka and Takaka Choir.

In 1998 Freda, now retired, saw an advertisement for part-time secretary of the Motueka Arts Council and applied successfully. It was based on a 12-hour month and was mainly for administrative functions - mail, meetings, minutes, communications, then stretching into making applications for funding and grants. About this time a major push was under way for the Arts Council to help commission art works and street furniture for High Street, ostensibly as a Millennium project funded by the Lottery Board.

"Ten years now for some of those items is probably a good lifetime," she says, "but the street furniture has certainly made the town more interesting. And it was never really finished because they ran out of money."

She is proud of her work on the Motueka Art Walk, developing the information and designing the pamphlet. And her other much appreciated contribution to the arts scene in town has been the events she set up inviting local and national authors to meet with local readers in venues such as the library. "Often it became an exchange of information and ideas about local history."

Freda became Arts Council president in 2009, but retired after one year. "I want to go overseas next year and I felt they needed new blood and perhaps a new direction that wasn't happening, so it was best to stand aside."

John died just over a year ago after spending two difficult years in Woodlands.

Freda is pleased to be able to retire in Motueka. "You have to make an effort yourself, but there's certainly plenty to do here and there's certainly plenty of help available if you need it."

[ Return ]