Otari-Wilton’s Bush

Posted on April 1, 2020 by Janet

It’s been a while since I blogged about New Zealand and our 2018 trip, but I’ll correct that today, since there was one garden omitted – and it was my favourite. If you recall, in my last blog we were sailing back to the North Island from the South Island and settling ourselves into New Zealand’s beautiful capital city of Wellington for the final chapter of our trip. Today, I want to take you to what was my favourite public garden of our entire 3-week tour, Otari-Wilton’s Bush (whose proper name is Otari Native Botanic Garden and Wilton’s Bush Reserve, but I’ll call it OWB for short). Let’s walk from the car park through the main entrance gate or warahoa…..

….. past the Kauri Lawn and the familiar trunks of the kauri trees (Agathis australis) we’d fallen in love with a few weeks earlier on the Manginangina Kauri Walk in the Puketi Forest near Bay of Islands, on our Maori culture day.

The path leads past interesting New Zealand natives towards the information centre where we can……

….. find a map. This place is massive! There are ten kilometres of walking trails over 100 hectares (247 acres) of native podocarp-northern rata forest featuring 5 hectares of gardens containing half of New Zealand’s native plants. In total, there are.1200 species, hybrids and cultivars of indigenous plants, and we have such a short time to visit! On that note, I should add that there was a reason why it took me so long to get this blog together: the complexity of the garden and our speed rushing through it meant that I didn’t feel I could do it justice without researching it a little more than the other public gardens we’d visited, which were more straightforward…. rose garden, perennial border, etc. There is not that kind of typical botanical garden approach here at OWB. It’s all about native plants and their conservation! I could have spent two days there, easily

Because it’s difficult to read the map (click on it or download it for a better look), here is the legend:

1 –      Plants for the home garden
2 –      Brockie rock garden
3 –      Wellington coastal plants
4 –      Grass and sedge species
5 –      Threatened species
6 –      Hebe species
7 –      Rainshadow garden
8 –      Flax cultivars
9 –      Pittosporum species
10 –     Coprosma species
11 –     Olearia species
12 –     Northern collection
13 –     Divaricate collection
14 –     Gymnosperm (conifer) collection
15 –     Fernery
16 –     Alpine garden
17 –     Dracophyllum garden
18 –     38
19 –     Broom garden

The garden and surrounding bush has a complicated history, from the Maori first inhabitants – Taranaki tapū or sub-tribes – who migrated to the general area in 1821 from the Wellington region; to the arrival of European settlers in the 1840s; to the allocation of 500 acres to Maori tribes; to the 1860 purchase by Job Wilton of 108 acres for farming; to the leasing by one tribe of 200 acres to three settlers; and subsequent sales by other tribes to other settlers. By 1900, prominent citizens of Wellington began to realize that the natural land around the city was in demise. As another 134 acres of tribal land was being sold to settlers, Wellington City Council stepped in and purchased it. By 1918, Otari’s status was changed to a reserve “for Recreation purposes and for the preservation of Native Flora.” In 1926, the well-known botanist, plant explorer and ecologist Dr. Leonard Cocayne presented a proposal to create a collection of indigenous plants on the site: the Otario Native Plant Open Air Museum. He was named Honorary Botanist to the Wellington City Council and effectively Director of the Plant Museum. Over the next few years, he collected 300 native plants and published the guidelines for the development and arrangement of the museum. Upon his death in 1934, he was buried on the site.

Let’s head out over the canopy bridge spanning the ‘bush’ below.

Visitors gazing out over this scene can appreciate how this part of New Zealand looked before cities and highways were built and invasive plants outcompeted native flora.

The garden has done a good job of labelling native trees to inspire visitors to choose these for their own gardens. This is karaka (Corynocarpus laevigatus).

This is the tawa tree (Beilschmiedia tawa).

This is rewarewa (Knightia excelsa).

Looking down, you can see the exquisite structure of the silver ferns or pongas (Alsophila dealbata, formerly Cyathea).

It’s easy to see why this fern enjoys such an elevated position in New Zealand.

Interpretive signage is well done in the garden.

Though it is far away, I attempt a photo of New Zealand’s wood pigeon.

After the canopy walkway, I find myself in a section devoted to plants for the home gardener. Seven fingers or patē (Schefflera digitata) is a small, spreading tree fond of shade and damp places. It’s the only New Zealand species in the genus Schefflera.

The Three Kings kaikomako (Pennantia baylisiana) was down to a single extant plant in New Zealand when it was discovered on a scree slope on Three Kings Island in 1945 by Professor Geoff Baylis of Otago University. Seeds were harvested, allowing it to return from the brink of extinction.

Gold-variegated karaka (Corynocarpus laevigatus ‘Picturata’) is a colorful Otari-Wilton’s Bush introduction of the evergreen New Zealand laurel tree. Its Maori name “karaka” means orange, and is the colour of the tree’s fruit.

The Leonard Cockayne centre can be booked for small meetings, workshops and education sessions.

Our American Horticultural Society tour group listens to Otari Curator-Manager Rewi Elliot giving an overview on the garden. You can see the memorial plaque at the base of the large rock, the burial site for Leonard and Maude Cockayne.

In the adjacent Brockie Rock Garden, I find Chatham Island brass buttons (Leptinella potentillina) is a rhizomatous groundcover adapted to foot traffic.

Slender button daisy (Leptinella filiformis) is bearing its little white pompom flowers.

Purple bidibid or New Zealand burr (Acaena inermis) has become a popular groundcover plant in Northern hemisphere gardens.

Chatham Island geranium (G. traversii) has pretty pink flowers. Its easy-going nature recommends it as a good native for New Zealand gardeners.

Like a lot of shrubby veronicas, Veronica topiaria used to belong to the Hebe genus before DNA analysis. It has a compact, topiary-like nature and tiny white summer flowers.

Silver tussock grass (Poa cita) is a tough, drought-tolerant native adapted to the poorest soils.

This is a lovely view from the Cockayne Overlook.

Below, a path is flanked by some of the sedges (Carex sp.) for which New Zealand has become renowned throughout the gardening world.

We catch a glimpse of New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax) on the right along the path.

Castlepoint daisy (Brachyglottis compacta) is native to the limestone cliffs on the Wairarapa Coast of New Zealand’s North Island. Like many species here, it is considered at risk in the wild.

We had seen Marlborough rock daisy (Pachystegia insignis) at the Dunedin Botanical Garden earlier in the trip. It’s such a handsome plant.

A gardener trims the base of a sedge along the path. There are signs in the garden stating “Please do not pull out our ‘weeds’”, explaining that they may look like weeds but several are threatened endemics that are allowed to casually self-seed in the garden.

Orange tussock sedge (Carex secta), aka makuro or pukio. is common to wetlands throughout New Zealand.

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Gardeners are at work trimming the sedges with the podocarp-northern rata forest in the background.

The Wellington Coastal Garden, below, is home to native plants found on the rocky foreshores, sand dunes and scrub-coloured cliffs of Wellington. Many plants here have thick, fleshy leaves or waxy surfaces to cope with wind and salt spray.

The Rain Shadow Garden features plants native to Marlborough, Canterbury and Otago in the South Island, specifically to regions lying east of the Southern Alps where rainfall is scant. From Wikipedia: In the South Island of New Zealand is to be found one of the most remarkable rain shadows anywhere on Earth. The Southern Alps intercept moisture coming off the Tasman Sea, precipitating about 6,300 mm (250 in) to 8,900 mm (350 in) liquid water equivalent per year and creating large glaciers. To the east of the Southern Alps, scarcely 50 km (30 mi) from the snowy peaks, yearly rainfall drops to less than 760 mm (30 in) and some areas less than 380 mm (15 in). The tussock grasslands are common in New Zealand’s rain shadow.

To northern hemisphere eyes, New Zealand has a lot of strange plants, but none tickle our fancy more than toothed or fierce lancewood (Pseudopanax ferox). You’ll see its mature tree form a little further down in our tour of the garden but I love this photo illustrating the juvenile form, often described as Doctor Seussian or like a broken umbrella. It is now seen in gardens throughout the world, mostly owing to the 2004 Chelsea Flower Show where it starred in New Zealand’s gold-medal-winning garden exhibit.

This is my favourite image in the garden because it celebrates plants that typify the New Zealand native palette – the buff sedges and the wiry shrubs in ‘any-colour-but-green’. Save for the sword-like leaves of the cabbage palm (Cordyline australis) at the top of the picture, there is nothing ‘luxuriant’ about the plants in this garden. They evolved their sparse foliage to outsmart hungry predators or to protect themselves from wind, heat and salt.

As an illustration, here is Coprosma obconica, considered threatened in its native niche, with its “divaricating” growth habit (branching at sharp angles) when young. Note that its tender foliage is in the centre of this wiry sphere, thus protected from the nibbles of herbivores.

But then there are the big grasses and phormiums, which lend the opposite lush feeling. I love this garden, too, with its collection of flaxes, both the large New Zealand flax or harakeke (Phormium tenax) and the smaller mountain flax or wharariki (Phormium colensoi, formerly P. cookianum). In milder climates of North America, we see P. colensoi cultivars used extensively, e.g. ‘Maori Maiden’, ‘Black Adder’, ‘Sundowner’, etc. This is P. tenax ‘Goliath’.

A closer look at ‘Goliath’. The Māori grow harakeke plants especially for weaving and rope-making. Note the leaves of the Carex, illustrating the mnemonic “sedges have edges”.

At the base of the steps is a beautiful stand of South Island toetoe grass (Austroderia richardii, formerly Cortaderia). It is related to the South American pampas grass (Cortaderia selloana) which has become an invasive in New Zealand (and also coastal California).

Below we see the juvenile (right) and mature (left) forms of fierce lancewood (Pseudopanax ferox) growing side by side. Note the stout trunk and the different leaves on the adult tree. Botanists theorize that the tree evolved its narrow, young form with its hooked leaves to thwart herbivory by New Zealand’s flightless bird, the giant moa, which was hunted to extinction by Polynesian settlers five hundred years ago. Once the plant reaches a certain height – around 3 metres or 9 feet in 10-15 years – it gets on with the regular business of being a tree. The forms are so different that early taxonomists mistook them for different species.

Nearby is a garden labelled “the hybrid swarm”, featuring offspring of crossings of two other lancewood species, Pseudopanax crassifolius or horoeka and P. lessonii or houpara.

One of the tour members calls to me that she has heard the tui bird and I pass a stand of Richardson’s hibiscus (H. richardsonii)…..

…. as we go exploring into denser garden areas.

Sure enough, there it is – not the best photo, but it’s a treat to find it here. The Māori call this bird the ngā tūī, and this particular bird’s black-and-white colouration (its iridescence isn’t notable in this light) illustrates why the colonists called it the parson bird. It is one of two extant species of honeyeaters in New Zealand, the other being the bellbird. If you read my blog on Fisherman’s Bay Garden, you might have watched the YouTube video I made of that lovely garden with the entire soundtrack comprised of the bellbird’s song.

But time is fleeting and we still have the Fernery to visit. I stop for a moment to photograph Kirk’s daisy or kohurangi (Brachyglottis kirkii var. kirkii). It is in decline and classed as threatened, mostly due to predation from possums, deer and goats.

Common New Zealand broom (Carmichaelia australis) is not related to European broom (Cytisus scoparius), which is as invasive in New Zealand as it is throughout the temperate world.

Here is a large specimen of bog pine (Halocarpus bidwillii).

I pass a small water garden surrounded by rushes.

Crossing back over the canopy walkway, I come to the totara (Podocarpus totara) with its stringy, flaking bark. This specimen was planted in the 1930s and could live for more than 1,000 years. It is one of 5 tall trees in the Mixed Conifer-Broadleaf Forest type here; the others are kahikatea (Dacrycarpus dacrydioides), matai (Podocarpus taxifolia), rimu (Dacrydium cupressinum) and miro (Prumnopitys ferruginea). Totara wood is strong and resistant to rot; it was used traditionally by the Māori for carving and to make their waka or canoes. On trees 150 to 200 years old, an anti-microbial, anti-inflammatory medicinal product called totarol can be extracted from the heartwood on a regular basis. A dioecious species, female trees bear masses of fleshy, red, edible berries that the Māori collected in autumn by climbing the trees with baskets.

Now I’m on the boardwalk heading back through the Fernery to the parking lot and our bus. It was April 10, 1968 when Cyclone Giselle brought sudden winds of 275 kilometres per hour (171 mph) to Wellington, sinking the interisland ferry Wahine in sight of the harbour, with 53 lives lost of the 734 aboard. But the cyclone, the worst in New Zealand’s history, also knocked down trees throughout the country, including a swath cut through the forest at Otari-Wilton’s Bush. The opening created light favourable for the growing of ferns, and thus the fernery was launched late that year.

I see New Zealand’s iconic silver fern or ponga, which has had a botanical genus name change from Cyathea dealbata to Alsophila dealbata, courtesy of DNA sequencing. Look at the ferns colonizing its trunk.

Later, I get a closer look at the plants climbing another silver fern, which were identified for me by an Otari botanist for my 2018 blog New Zealand – The Fernery Nation. The climbing thread fern is Icarus filiformis (formerly Blechnum filiforme) or pānoko. The broadleaf plant is scarlet rātā vine or in Māori akatawhiwhi (Metrosideros fulgens).

I pause at a few low-growing ferns, including Cunningham’s maidenhair (Adiantum cunninghamii).

…… and the rhizomatous creeping fern Asplenium lamprophyllum.

But it’s the tree ferns that are most spectacular here. Milne’s tree fern (Alsophila milnei) has also had a genus name change from Cyathea. It is endemic to Raoul Island.

Kermadec tree fern (Alsophila kermadecensis) is also native to Raoul Island.

Mamaku or black tree fern has also been moved out of Cyathea; it is now called Sphaeropteris medullaris. It can grow very tall, up to 20 metres (60 feet).

I take a quick glimpse into the native bush, which encompasses 100 hectares here as our guide calls for me to hurry. I’m the last one on the bus!

Leaving the garden, I glance back at the beautiful pou whenua carved with the creatures of the forest. Given that “Otari” is a Māori word for “place of snares” recalling its heritage as a traditional place for bird-hunting, it is fitting that it is now celebrated as a place for watching birds and all manner of wildlife and plants.

As I run for the bus, I stop to take one last photo, of the unfurling crozier, or koru in Māori, of rough tree fern or whekī (Dicksonia squarrosa). Traditionally, the koru symbolizes perpetual movement, a return to the point of origin. It seems that the people of Wellington and those who fought to reclaim the bush for nature and education have done that here very well.

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If you enjoyed this blog, be sure to read my New Zealand series of blogs:

Hiking Under Aoraki Mount Cook

Posted on April 6, 2018 by Janet

Of the three January 2018 weeks we spent touring New Zealand on the American Horticultural Society’s “Gardens, Wine & Wilderness” tour, without a doubt my two favourite outings were our overnight voyage on Doubtful Sound in Fiordland and the day we hiked the Hooker Valley Track under the country’s tallest mountain, Aoraki Mount Cook. That’s not to say I don’t love gardens, but for me there is simply no garden that compares with the one that nature conjures in places that we have not disturbed. So it was with great excitement, a few hours after lunching at Ann & Jim Jerram’s lovely Ostler Wine vineyard in the Waitaki Valley that we found ourselves standing beside Highway 80 on the shores of Lake Pukaki, staring in awe at the majestic mountain in the distance. Every camera and cellphone came out.

You can see why the Māori of the South Island called their sacred mountain Aoraki, or “cloud piercer”. (I’ll tell you more of their founding legend later.)

We continued driving Highway 80 (aka Mount Cook Road) along the shore of Lake Pukaki on our way into Aoraki Mount Cook National Park. As at Queenstown, we saw invasive “wilding conifers” along the shore – in this case, lodgepole pines (Pinus contorta), left, from western North America. Introduced into New Zealand in 1880, the trees were intended to “beautify” the lakeshore but have invaded throughout the Mackenzie Basin.

Like Lake Louise in Canada’s Banff National Park, Lake Pukaki appears turquoise because its waters consist of glacial melt from the mountains we’ll see over the next 36 hours. In the meltwater is superfine “rock flour” or “glacial milk” consisting of rock that has been pulverized into fine powder by the grinding action of ice as the glaciers melt and retreat.

Though I wouldn’t really understand the hydrology here until I came home and studied maps, we then drove over a small stream wending its way out into Lake Pukaki’s northern shore. This, I would learn, is a channel of the Tasman River, which empties both the Hooker glacier and massive Tasman glaciers in adjacent mountain valleys in the park. Now at the height of New Zealand summer, it was not a big flow, but I imagine these braided channels roar in springtime when the gravel floodplain accepts the snowmelt.

Moments later, we arrived at the 164-room Hermitage Aoraki Mount Cook Hotel that would be our home for the next two nights. Built in 1958 and extended several times, this is the third incarnation of the mountainside hotel. The original, built in 1884 by surveyor and Mount Cook ranger Frank Huddlestone, was sited further into the valley near the Mueller Glacier. It was taken over by the New Zealand government in 1895. As visitors started pouring into the region, the hotel could not keep up with the demand for rooms, and was also subject to seasonal flooding, which ultimately destroyed it. In 1914, a second hotel was erected; it would host four decades of guests, including a young Edmund Hillary and his climbing mates who bunked here during their 1948 ascent of Mount Cook. Five years later, he and Sherpa Tenzing Norguay would be the first to summit Mount Everest. After a 1957 fire destroyed the second Hermitage, the current one was built by the New Zealand government, under the aegis of its Tourist Hotel Corporation (THC) which also owned other tourist properties. In 1990 the THC was sold to a private corporation. Our room was on the 5^th floor of the rear wing and had a floor-to-ceiling view of Aoraki Mount Cook.

It had been a long Day 12 of our tour, starting in Dunedin with a morning stop in Oamaru before our wine lunch in the Waitaki. After a delicious dinner (appetizer below), shared with hundreds of other mountain tourists, we hit the sack. Tomorrow there would be a valley hike – and plants!

My Hooker Valley Track Hiking Journal

10:00 – The next morning, we left The Hermitage (roughly the red square), cheating a little by getting a lift in our tour bus (which cuts off the first few miles and at least a half-hour walk) to the campground, shown at the first yellow arrow, below. Our destination, Hooker Lake – the second yellow arrow – didn’t seem far on the map, but it’s a good hike, as you’ll see.

10:17 – Armed with a lunch we’d scrounged from our breakfast buffet, off we went in the fine, mid-January summer weather on the Hooker Valley Track (Kiwi for “trail”).

10: 21 – Soon we were passing through matagouri shrubland. Dark and prickly, the other name for this riparian native is wild Irishman (Discaria toumatou).

10:26 – Through the thorny matagouri branches, the massive southeast flank of Mount Sefton appeared. Called Maukatua by the Māori, it’s the 13^th tallest mountain in the Southern Alps at 3,151 metres (10,338 feet).

10:28 – Look at all these amazing golden Spaniards! What? You don’t see any Spanish tourists? No, golden Spaniard or spear grass (Aciphylla aurea) is the name for the sharp-leaved plants stretching across this meadow. Now we could clearly see Mount Sefton and its neighbour to the right, The Footstool (2,764 metres – 9,068 feet).

10:30 – The meadows were spangled with snow totara (Podocarpus nivalis), also called mountain totara. A much-hybridized evergreen, its progeny appears in temperate gardens throughout the world.

10: 32 – The track features three suspension bridges, two of which were rebuilt in 2015 to divert them from areas prone to flooding or avalanches. This was the first bridge. From here, you could just spot……

10:34 – …..Mueller Lake as it spilled its own meltwater from the Mueller Glacier just beyond into Hooker River below the bridge.

I walked (bounced?) across the bridge behind my husband who was holding onto his Tilley hat in the fierce valley wind. I was very proud of him. He is not a gardener, and a 3-week garden-wilderness tour of New Zealand might not have been the first item on his bucket list when we contemplated this trip in 2017, but he was enjoying it very much – provided the wine flowed at dinnertime!

10:39 – Here was Griselinia littoralis, aka kapuka or New Zealand broadleaf, an evergreen that normally grows as a tree. Though its Latin name indicates a preference for the seashore (littoral), we are really not far from the Tasman Sea in this mountain valley. (And here I must offer my thanks to New Zealand plant wizard Steve Newall, who helped me identify many of these endemic treasures. Have a read about Steve in this piece by my Facebook friend Kate Bryant).

10:41 – That long berm at left, below, is the moraine wall of Mueller Glacier.

10:44 – We passed a few invasive plants in the first meadows, like foxglove (Digitalis purpurea), below.

10:50 – I passed my phone to my husband and asked for a portrait….of my best side. Like some 70,000 other New Zealand tourists, I wanted to have a record that I actually made this hike.

It was much warmer than I thought it would be, and I adopted my customary “I thought this was a glacier hike?” clothing modification, the same strategy used a few years ago in Greenland to hike the boardwalk through the alpine meadows to the UNESCO Ilulissat Icefjord site.

11:01 – Okay, back to New Zealand. Forty minutes after we began our hike, we crossed the second suspension bridge, known as the Hooker Bluff bridge. The scenery here can only be described as spectacular.

11:02 – Now we saw the Hooker River spilling into Mueller Lake.

11:05 – After crossing the bridge, the river was on our right side. Though small, it was powerful, its crashing cascades seeming to echo off the nearby mountain walls.

11:06 – I was so transfixed, I stopped for a few minutes to make a recording.

11:07 – Along the path, one of the golden Spaniards (Aciphylla aurea) had toppled over under its own weight. You can see the umbellifer flowers and strange leaves against the stem

11:08 – A moment later, I saw one pointing towards Mount Sefton’s lofty glaciers.

11:11 – And three minutes after that, I stopped to mourn that I had not been here a month earlier to see the flowering of the iconic Mount Cook lily, Ranunculus lyallii, the world’s largest buttercup, below. It was collected by and named for Scottish botanist David Lyall (1817-1895) who had travelled as ship surgeon around New Zealand and the Antarctic from 1839-41 on HMS Terror. (Terror was later lost with all hands, along with HMS Erebus, in Canada’s Arctic during Captain John Franklin’s ill-fated 1845 expedition to find a shortcut from Europe to Asia. After years of searching, both shipwrecks were found in 2014 and 2016.) In assembling Flora Antarctica containing Lyall’s plant collections, his friend, English botanist Joseph Hooker (1817-1911), noted that the New Zealand shepherds called it the ‘water-lily’, an appropriate name since it is the only known ranunculus with peltate leaves. (It was Joseph Hooker’s father, William Hooker, for whom this valley and glacier were named by Julius von Haast in his geological survey of the Southern Alps in 1863.)

But the Māori of the South Island – the ancient Waitaha, then the Ngāti Māmoe, then the present-day Ngāi Tahu – had known the flower for hundreds of years before David Lyall arrived to botanize. They called it “kōpukupuku”. It has even been featured on postage stamps.

11:13 – A few minutes later, I felt somewhat mollified to come upon a few pristine specimens of Gentianella divisa.

11-17 – Unlike a Canadian alpine meadow in, say, Alberta, there is little bright colour in these tussock meadows under Aoraki Mount Cook. Many of the herbaceous plants tend to have white flowers, like Lobelia angulata, below.

11:19 – You can barely see the tiny white flowers of inaka (Dracophyllum longifolium), one of the common native shrubs in the Hooker Valley.

11:24 – So far, we’d been walking on crushed gravel. But now we set off across the meadow on a beautiful boardwalk. As it began, it pointed us at Mount Sefton and The Footstool, but a few minutes later, it….

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11:26 – …… veered to the right and gave us the full valley view of Aoraki Mount Cook.

11:30 – The shimmering meadow here was mostly mid-ribbed snow tussock (Chionochloa pallens).

11:32 – I was happy that I was able to identify mountain cottonwood (Ozothamnus vauvilliersii), which I had also seen in flower on Ben Lomond in Queenstown.

11:36 – Steve Newall helped me identify this lovely little community: the silver leaves of mountain daisy (Celmisia semicordata), its flowers already past, sitting in a bed of Gaultheria crassa to the left, with creeping wire vine (Muehlenbeckia axillaris) up against the rock. The tussock grass is mid-ribbed snow tussock (Chionochloa pallens).

11:37 – A minute later, we were crossing the third bridge, called the Upper Hooker Suspension Bridge. This one seemed to catch the wind and the vibrations, especially near the river banks, were very strong!

11:43 – I stopped on the path for a few minutes to absorb the sight of these wonderful meadows and shoot a short video. Here’s how they looked:

11:54 – As we approached the end of the track, I found a stand of creeping wire vine (Muehlenbackia axillaris) in flower…..

11:54 – and Raoulia glabra with its little pompom flowers.

11:55 – When I looked up from the tiny alpine plants nestled in these rocks, I couldn’t help but notice the massive boulders lying in the meadow. The one below looked like it had sheared clean off the mountain and tumbled down the scree slope. But of course it might have happened dozens or hundreds of years ago. Unless one was actually there…….

11:56 – A minute later, we arrived at our destination. Hooker Lake lay before us – a body of water that hadn’t been there at all before the late 1970s, when Hooker Glacier began its retreat. In geological terms, it’s referred to as a “proglacial” lake. It had taken us an hour and 39 minutes. We celebrated by walking along the path to a little picnic area and eating our lunch.

12:12 – With our picnic finished, I headed down to join the tourists posing for photos on the lake’s shore.

12:19 – My arthritic knee was not going to keep me from kneeling on the glacial till to capture a souvenir image of this little iceberg – aka “bergy bit” – washed up on shore. As I looked up from this little lake – melted from a glacier named for an English botanist by a German geologist – at a towering mountain – named for an English sea captain by another English sea captain – I was unaware of the sacred nature of this park.

Long before Captain John Lort Stokes decided in 1851, while surveying New Zealand, to honour his predecessor, Captain James Cook, by naming the country’s highest peak after him, the Māori of the South Island knew it as Aoraki, or “cloud piercer”. The Ngāi Tahu do not see the mountain merely as the result of millions of years of tectonic uplift as the Pacific and Indo-Australian Plates collide far beneath the surface along the island’s western coast For them it is the core of their creation myth: the mountain possesses sacred mauri. They say that long before there was an island called Aotearoa (New Zealand), there was no sign of land in the great ocean. When the sky father Raki wed the earth mother Papa-tui-nuku, Raki’s four celestial sons came down to greet their father’s new wife. They were Ao-raki (Cloud in the Sky), Raki-ora (Long Raki), Raki-rua (Raki the Second) and Raraki-roa (Long Unbroken Line). They arrived in their waka (canoe) and sailed the sea, but could not find land. When they attempted to return to the heavens, their song of incantation failed and their waka fell into the sea and turned to stone as it listed, forming the south island. The brothers climbed onto the high side of their waka and were also turned to stone. They exist today as the four tallest peaks in the area: Aoraki is the highest (Mount Cook); the other brothers are Rakiora (Mount Dampier), Rakirua (Mount Teichelmann) and Rarakiroa (Mount Tasman).

When title to the park was vested to the Ngāi Tahu in 1998, the mountain’s name was formally changed to recognize Aoraki, and all management decisions are made in concert with them to respect the environment as their sacred place. This remarkable carving by the late Cliff Whiting hangs in the park’s Visitor Centre. It depicts a fierce Aoraki and the four brothers/mountains.

Moments after kneeling at the shore of Hooker Lake, I gazed up at the sky and saw a cloud. People who study clouds call this an orographic cloud – its shape distorted by air currents that must lift in response to tall mountain peaks. But when I looked later at the photo I’d made, all I could see was the face of a fierce ancient god gazing across the sky.

12:20 – Okay, back to earth now. I didn’t bring my ultra-zoom camera with me on the hike or I could have captured the front wall of Hooker Glacier. As it is, I enlarged one of my images to show the glacier and its calving wall. If you’re looking to see sparkly-white, gleaming glaciers, you’re in for a shock here. As my friend Andy Fyon, retired head of the Ontario Geological Survey, says: “Active alpine glaciers can be a bit like a child. They revel in the rough and tumble life and in getting dirty! That is not the same for continental glaciers, which enjoy staying clean.”

12:30 – Looking at the upper part of Aoraki Mount Cook, below, you can see the summit partly obscured by a cloud. I’ve also drawn in the south ridge that was recently renamed the Hillary Ridge. The closest of the mountain’s three peaks, Low Peak (3599 metre – 11,808 ft) was first summited in 1948 via the southern ridge by a foursome that included Edmund Hillary, Mick Sullivan and Ruth Adams and their guide Harry Ayres, Three years later, Hillary, along with Tenzing Norgay, would become the first person to summit Mount Everest. But that 1948 ascent of Mount Cook came with attendant drama, for when the foursome went on to attempt the nearby peak La Perouse (out of my photo to the left or west), Ruth Adams’s rope broke and her 50-foot slide down the slope left her unconscious with several fractures. Hillary would contribute the first chapter to the gripping account of that rescue.

In fact, some 248 climbers have died attempting to climb Aoraki Mount Cook. Summiting is a considerable achievement in the world of couloirs and cirques and belays. I enclose the following video to demonstrate the skill needed. I estimate that I screamed “Oh, my god” or words to that effect a dozen times and averted my eyes at least 20 times. Put on your crampons and fasten your carabiner…..

12:38 – Heading back to the hotel now, we took a little side detour up to a few small tarns, which is alpine for glacial pond.

12:46 – The Upper Hooker Suspension Bridge was just as bouncy and windy on the return trip.

12:55 – We walked at the base of Mount Wakefield, which separates Hooker Valley from the Tasman Valley to the east.

12:59 – A small footbridge at the Stocking Stream Shelter took us over the Hooker River with its milky rock flour.

1:20 – Looking down a little later, I saw a drift of Parahebe lyallii.

1:35 – And creeping over a rock was one of the “bidibids”, Acaena saccaticupula.

1:53 – I saw my only Hooker Valley butterfly, the common copper, foraging on New Zealand harebell (Wahlenbergia albomarginata).

2:12 – Coming towards the end of the hike, I made a critical mistake. Weary now and gazing across the meadows at what looked to be a direct route back to the Hermitage, I said, “Why don’t we get off this winding path and go straight back across the meadow?” My husband, trusting soul that he is, reluctantly agreed. Neither of us knew that the only people who ventured this way were mountain bikers. With our tired legs, the spongy soil and long grass of the meadows made the last stretch seem never-ending.

2:14 – In the meadows in front of the hotel were a few lupines. Despite now being on the noxious aliens list, these invaders are quite famous for their massive spring show in the park.

2:19 – Parts of the meadow turned into dried-up gravel stream beds that are clearly part of the seasonal drainage patterns of the rivers here.

2:21 – I found another famous New Zealand mat plant, scabweed (Raoulia australis), growing here.

2:37 – And finally, 4 hours and 20 minutes after we began our hike, we arrived back at the sign-post near the hotel.

3:00 – As we kicked off our hiking shoes and collapsed onto our beds in the 5^th floor room with the great view of the mountains, we cracked open a bottle of the Gëwurztraminer we’d bought at Ostler Vineyard the previous day. A glass of chilled wine never tasted so good.

9:30 – And later, after dinner, as the light dimmed in the sky, I looked out on Aoraki Mount Cook with something akin to affection. Like the Māori, I sensed its spirit infusing this spectacular landscape.

9:43 – And as the sun shed its last rays on its snowy peak, I gave thanks for the pilgrimage we had made to be close to it.

Bay of Islands – Māoris, Kauris and Kia Ora

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Janet

When we arrived in New Zealand in early January, my knowledge of the country extended to the Wikipedia entry I read on the flight from Los Angeles to Auckland, much of which was skewed to the back-and-forth of modern politics. In other words, I didn’t know much at all – and in the post-Christmas rush to get away on a long trip, I thought that much research was fine. Fortunately, it would only be a matter of days before my understanding of the place began to expand.

For the Māori, who were the first humans to inhabit the country when their forebears arrived from eastern Polynesia around 1280, a date determined by archaeologists from a 1964 dig on the Coromandel Peninsula near present-day Auckland, which revealed the fishing lure, below, made of a tropical black-lipped pearl shell from East Polynesia and brought here in a waka (canoe) during settlement……..

…..”New Zealand” isn’t the name they gave the country. Instead, they called it Aotearoa, “land of the long white cloud”. It is the name that I first saw in the exhibit below, at the Auckland Museum, on our first day of touring.

Interestingly, that exhibit of the Chinese immigrants who came to seek their fortune in the country beginning in the late 19^th century featured a display case, below, devoted to the kauri gum industry, built on the exudate of the giant kauri trees (Agathis australis) that once formed large tracts of forest in New Zealand. A visit to one of those forests was on our itinerary on this fourth day of the American Horticultural Society’s “Gardens, Wine & Wilderness Tour” – and you will find it further down in this blog!

We were now in the Bay of Islands region of the North Island in the seaside town of Paihia. On the map below, you can see it in the upper right. This part of New Zealand is arguably the warmest, being closest to the equator. Over the next few weeks, we would travel to Fiordland in the far southwest of the South Island, which is closest to the Antarctic and therefore has the coldest winters.

On our arrival the afternoon before, we’d walked along the beach…..

….where many small offshore islands give the region its name……

….on our way to take a short ferry trip to the town of Russell across the bay for dinner. On the pier, we watched as fishermen brought in a giant blue marlin, estimated to be 375 pounds (170 kg).

It was only when we returned after dinner that we noticed the big marlin sculpture at the ferry dock dedicated to the American novelist Zane Grey (1872-1939), who’d put Paihia on the world travel map for its abundant game fishing when he built the Zane Grey Sporting Club on nearby Urupukapuka Island in the Bay of Islands. He also penned a book called Tales of the Angler’s Eldorado, about fishing in New Zealand.

Hongi Hika and the Missionaries

Today’s tour day began with lovely birdsong outside our window in the lush courtyard garden of the Scenic Hotel.

After breakfast we set off with our special guide for the day, Kena Alexander, our Māori culture specialist. He taught us the traditional greeting, “Kia ora”, which means roughly “be well”. He also told us about the Māori alphabet, which contains 15 letters: 10 consonants (including 2 two-letter diagraphs) and 5 vowels. They are a, e, h, i, k, m, n, ng, o, p, r, t, u, w, wh.

Soon we arrived at Kororipo Heritage Park, the site of important 19^th century interaction between northern Māoris and early European visitors.

By the time Captain James Cook visited the Bay of Islands on voyages in 1770 and 1777, Māori had been in the region for almost four centuries. But it was Hongi Hika (below middle), the fierce rangatira (chief) of the Kororipo Pā (a pā is a fortified village) in the Kerikeri Inlet who arranged for the protection of the pākehā (Europeans) who wanted to establish a mission here. In 1814, along with another chief, his brother-in-law Waikato, below left, he accompanied English missionary Thomas Kendall, below right, to Sydney Australia. Here, while studying agricultural methods and inviting Samuel Marsden to establish a mission at Pa Kororipo, he would also buy the muskets and ammunition that would trigger the Musket Wars of the next three decades and cement his reputation as the most fierce of the Māori rangatiras. Six years later, he would travel to England, where King George IV would present him with mail that he later wore into battle.

Hongi Hika liked to say he was born in 1772 (though later research proved him wrong by a few years), the same year that French Explorer Marion Du Fresne was killed and cannibalized, along with 26 of his men, in Te Hue Bay in the eastern part of Bay of Islands. The French sailors’ crime in the eyes of the Ngāpuhi iwi (tribe), who were their hosts, was their insistence, despite being warned, on using large nets to fish a beach on which the bodies of tribal ancestors had once washed up, a beach their descendants considered sacred. Three decades later, Hongi Hika used muskets to wage war against competing tribes in the area, after which they would follow the custom of eating their slain enemies, thus absorbing their manu or prestige, while the missionaries under his protection could only look on in disapproval. The practice was not new to the pākehā. In 1769 Captain James Cook and Joseph Banks aboard the Endeavor had witnessed it and Cook waxed philosophical on the topic in his journal. As the New Zealand government’s website notes: “He is credited with showing forbearance, restraint and a depth of understanding (he had a more moderate view of cannibalism, for example, than most of his crew) that put initial relations between Māori and Europeans on a sound footing, despite episodes of bloodshed on the first and second voyages”.

In January 1826, Hongi Hika was shot in battle on the banks of the Hokianga River. His injury meant he could no longer lead his iwi. In 1827, he was visited by Augustus Earle, who was the draughtsman aboard the HMS Beagle. Along with the young naturalist Charles Darwin, Earle was visiting the Bay of Islands, making beautiful paintings of the scenes he found, such as Hongi Hika, below, bedecked in white feathers and sitting with members of his tribe as he received the pākehā visitors. He would die in March 1828.

Today, the Kerikeri Mission Station consists of two buildings. The first, Kemp House (below), is New Zealand’s oldest building, erected in 1822.

A large jacaranda tree was in full bloom beside the house…..

…and on the other side was its historic garden, where we chatted with the volunteer working there.

The Stone Store, the country’s oldest stone building, was built in 1835. Interestingly, it was once a kauri-gum trading post…..

….. and it was now time to leave Kerikeri and head inland to see the iconic trees from which that gum was harvested.

In the Kauri Forest

Half an hour later, we arrived at the protected Puketi Forest to do the short Manginangina Kauri Walk. The 20,000-hectare (49,420 acre) Puketi-Omahuta forest is one of the best examples of the sub-tropical rainforest of the North Island.

Our guide Kena remained outside. He shared with us that his own family tribe had not been defeated in the New Zealand Wars (see the Waitangi treaty later in this blog) and had not ceded sovereignty over the lands in which the forest resides. Since they continue to be engaged in a legal action with the government, he does not enter the disputed land.

Boardwalks threaded their way under the towering trees in this sub-tropical forest…..

….. where tree ferns and nīkau palms share the understory.

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Look at these wonderful trees! In perfect conditions, their ghostly, pale trunks can achieve a massive girth. New Zealand’s largest tree is the kauri known as Tāne Mahuta in the Waipoua Forest, estimated to be 1,250-2,500 years old. Although its height 45.2 m (148 ft) is fairly modest, its 15.4 m (50 ft) girth and massive volume makes it the third largest conifer on the planet, after California’s sequoiadendrons and sequoias.

The kauri (Agathis australis) is endemic to the northern part of the North Island, i.e. north of 38°S. A conifer, it is in the Araucacieae family and distantly related to the Norfolk pine and monkey puzzle tree. Its straight bole made it valuable to the early Europeans as ship spars and masts, and it’s estimated that logging beginning in 1820 had by 1900 reduced the kauri population, originally 12,000 square kilometres, by 90-percent. Today, only 3-percent of the original forests remain. The government finally banned commerical kauri logging in 1985. As New Zealanders became aware of the great losses that had been inflicted, protected forests like Waipoua (1952) and Puketi were set aside, resulting in spectacular scenes like the one below, which I captured on our short visit to Puketi.

Among the many epiphytic plants is “perching lily” or kowharawhara (Astelia solandri) – the sole member of the genus that has this aerial habit.

In this forest, fallen kauris become part of the undergrowth……

…..however, there are kauri swamps in Northland where the anaerobic qualities of peat bogs and ancient salt marshes have preserved massive trunks that toppled eons ago – some carbon-dated to more than 50,000 years – often still bearing their attached green leaves. Sometimes referred to as “sub-fossil” kauri, they generated a swamp-extraction kauri timber industry beginning in the 1980s, sometimes by unscrupulous players, that saw wood selling for up to $10,000 per cubic metre, mainly to China. But these ancient kauris have also become a valuable aid to scientists, their annual growth rings a barcode of climate change over a vast number of years.

Apart from logging and swamp extraction, the kauri became most famous in colonial New Zealand for its gum, used and exported at the time for floor varnish and linoleum. Though the kauri is evergreen, like all rainforest trees the leaves shed periodically, accumulating at the base of the tree and eventually forming some 2 metres (6 feet) of soil there. As the tree exudes sap, it crystallizes, slowly forms chunks, then falls to the ground, becoming buried in the soil. As I mentioned at the top of this blog, gum harvesting generated a kind of boom that saw some 20,000 gum-diggers working the Northland forests and swamps by 1890: mostly Maori, Chinese, Malaysian and Yugoslav. Climbing a kauri tree to cut it and cause the tree to exude the gum was a special skill. And digging the swamps for fossilized gum was the worst kind of labour.

But it was lucrative: by 1918, the New Zealand kauri gum industry had exported product worth the staggering sum of £18,224,107.

In the Te Papa Museum in Wellington a few weeks later, I would see a spectacular sample of kauri gem embedded with insects. The oldest kauri gum, found in coal deposits, is some 50 million years old.

Today, seeing sap dripping at the base of a kauri tree is often a sign of kauri dieback disease. Visitors to the protected forests are requested to stay on the walkways, since the villain is a soil-borne organism, an oomycete (Phytophthora agathidicida) that causes root rot, defoliation and death. There is no known control. I saw such a tree at Puketi, its lower trunk riddled with cankers dripping with sap.

Our short, lovely stop at Puketi over, we were soon back on the road with Kena to pay a visit to his own tribe’s marae.

Visit to a Māori Marae

As we drove, I noted out the bus window dairy cattle grazing where a native brown sedge (Carex sp.) had popped up in the green forage. It reminded me of what our horticulture tour guide Panayoti Kelaidis, outreach director at Denver Botanic Gardens, had said to us: “New Zealand’s hills should be brown, not green.” Before cattle were imported for New Zealand’s thriving dairy industry, there were no green pastures; that changed with the concomitant use of green Eurasian grasses for animal forage.

After arriving at Kena’s marae, a rectangular plot of cleared land that is traditionally a meeting place providing social or spiritual needs to the Māori, we were called inside the beautiful wharenui (communal house), below, to participate in a traditional greeting ceremony or pōwhiri. We removed our shoes and entered, the women and men sitting in separate sections while we listened to the readings and to a speech from the elder. Photos were not permitted during the protocol, but it was a very moving ceremony, as we joined our Māori hosts in observing a silent remembrance of our own ancestors. At the culmination, Kena and his wife sang a song to us, and we in turn sang back to them (well, we had rehearsed Home on the Range and sounded quite good, I thought.)

The official ceremony now over, Kena pointed out the features of the wharenui, which we were free to photograph. The building interior represents the bosom of a beloved ancestor or spiritual figure. The carved ceiling ridge-beam or tāhuhu represents the backbone, while the painted rafters or heke represent the ribs.

The stunning designs on the heke, below, are traditional kōwhaiwhai. The symbolism is specific to each tribe’s environment, lineage and history, and might incorporate the koru (fern crozier), ngaru tai (ocean waves), fish or birds.

Carved wood figures called poutokomanawa appear on supporting posts. With their flashing eyes made of puau shell from sea snails, they represent tribal ancestors.

Kena happily answered our questions after the ceremony, then it was time to head back to our hotel to rest up before our next Māori cultural experience later that day.

As we drove, Kena pointed out a hilltop pā adjacent to the highway, one of many that can still be seen in Northland. So interesting to see these landforms and imagine how they functioned as self-contained villages hundreds of years ago.

An Evening at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds

On February 6, 1840, representatives of the British government and a group of northern Māori chieftains met at this lovely spot overlooking the Bay of Islands in Paihia…..

… to sign The Treaty of Waitangi. Copies of the treaty were then carried around New Zealand and ultimately signed by more than 500 chiefs, including 13 women. The British wanted the opportunity to acquire land; the Māoris wanted protection from the French. As it says on Wikipedia: “The text of the Treaty includes a preamble and three articles. It is bilingual, with the Māori text translated from the English. Article one of the English text cedes “all rights and powers of sovereignty” to the Crown. Article two establishes the continued ownership of the Māori over their lands, and establishes the exclusive right of pre-emption of the Crown. Article three gives Māori people full rights and protections as British subjects. However, the English text and the Māori text differ, particularly in relation to the meaning of having and ceding sovereignty. These discrepancies led to disagreements in the decades following the signing, eventually culminating in the New Zealand Wars.”

Though the treaty was considered by many to be the founding document of New Zealand, it did not form part of the law until 1975, when the Treaty of Waitangi Act was signed, establishing a permanent Waitangi Tribunal to investigate breaches of the original treaty and make recommendations (without the power of enforcement) on claims brought by Māori. In 1999, to speed up the process for negotiating settlements associated with breaches of the treaty, the government changed the process so claimants could go directly to the Office of Treaty Settlements without engaging in the tribunal process. (Wikipedia) Nonetheless, the treaty is still celebrated on February 6^th which is the annual Waitangi Day holiday.

Since one of my long-time photographic projects has been creating a comprehensive collection of honey bee images, I was delighted to find a few manuka blossoms (Leptospermum scoparium) still hanging on at the treaty grounds. They turned out to be the only floweringn examples I found in all New Zealand of this famous shrub, which produces the most expensive honey in the world). And best of all, there were honey bees nectaring on the blooms.

There was also harakeke or New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax), which has a starring role in Māori ethnobotany, its fibres having been used in traditional kākahu (cloaks), kete (containers) and whāriki (mats). Not to mention, of course, the popularity of its vibrant hybrids as colourful foliage plants in warmer parts of the world.

But we were at the Treaty Grounds to participate in an evening of traditional Maori activities: the enactment of a wero or warrior challenge as part of the pōwhiri welcome, then a musical concert by the performance group, followed by a traditional hangi dinner. We watched as our meal was prepared in the modern version of a pit oven, which would traditionally have been dug in the ground using heated stones to cook, instead of gas..

Under banana leaves, there were layered meats and fish, as well as kumara (sweet potatoes) and more. But it still had some cooking to do while we continued with our program….

…taking a walk through Waitangi’s beautiful bush to observe our own traditional ‘chieftain for a day’, Denver Botanic Garden’s Panayoti Kelaidis, engage in a traditional wero, or warrior challenge.

Another of our guests, Ciril, engaged in a further challenge in front of the Waitangi Treaty House. Fortunately, both Panayoti and Ciril passed the challenge and were welcomed; they then offered speeches of thanks to our Māori hosts. (And even the fact that you know the performers do this several times a week for hundreds of tourists doesn’t diminish the solemnity or the significance of the reenactments).

Although I didn’t visit the actual Treaty House, which was home from 1833-40 to James Busby, the first representative of the British Crown, we were welcomed into Te Whare Rūnanga (the House of Assembly), which was opened on February 6, 1940 to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the treaty. Although similar in design to Kena Alexander’s wharenui, this building was intended to unite all Māori of Aotearoa and contains carvings and folklore from tribes throughout the country.

Below is a photo of Sir Āpirana Ngata, a longtime Labour politician (then retired) and organizer of the 1940 centennial, leading a haka. (And if you are unfamiliar with the spine-tingling Māori haka, you must watch the New Zealand All Blacks performing a haka before their 2011 World Cup rugby final against the French national team.)

Finally, it was time to enjoy a concert of traditional Māori music and dance, courtesy of the Te Pito Whenua performance group. What fun to have a front row seat to watch these talented artists with their beautiful tattoos….

…..and wonderful routines….

…. including the traditional Polynesian poi dance, featuring fancy acrobatic work with those poi balls.

As we departed the concert to enjoy the hangi buffet, Doug and I posed for a fun moment with the performers. As ‘touristy’ as it was, it also made me feel that the entire day — from the shores of Kerikeri Inlet to the kauri forest to Kena’s marae to this light moment on these historic grounds — had immensely enriched my understanding of and affection for this beautiful country, Aotearoa. Kia ora.

Janet Davis Explores Colour

In the garden & the world

Tag Archives: Māori

Otari-Wilton’s Bush

Hiking Under Aoraki Mount Cook

Bay of Islands – Māoris, Kauris and Kia Ora

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