Wellington pt. 2: Treasure Box

Nov 25-27

After a few days of watching presentations and talking to other scientists about Australasian plants and their classification and evolution(and eating really good food), as well as giving my own presentation about hebes, I took some time to wander around the Te Papa museum. Te Papa Tongarewa, the full name of the msueum, means Our Place in Māori (I’ve also seen it translated roughly as “treasure box”) and is the national museum of New Zealand, showcasing cultural and natural history. There’s a lot to learn about indigenous Māori culture and history—and in general on this trip I came to appreciate how visible and respected this culture is in New Zealand. There was also an excellent new exhibit put on by the Natural History department called Te Taiao Nature, spotlighting New Zealand’s flora and fauna and geology. In addition to the visible exhibits, the museum is a repository for collections of natural and cultural specimens, including an entire herbarium of preserved NZ plants. This is actually where most of my hebe specimens came from for my research (I extracted DNA from little leaf fragments taken from the original specimens). There are lots of people working behind the scenes, curating the collections and doing research on them, including my excellent collaborator who sent the specimens.

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I also stopped by a colorful art exhibit featuring New Zealand artsits. Later I saw a sobering exhibit about Gallipoli, a horrific World War I campaign involving New Zealand soldiers; the exhibit featured larger than life wax figures made by the same studio that made the models for the Lord of the Rings films (the Weta Workshop, which I also visited). And finally, I walked around the outdoor garden that included some hebe plants that I saw way back during my first visit to New Zealand and Te Papa and was taken with, without knowing what they were—I took a picture on that first visit that ended up being a background for my presentation slides at the conference.

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The next adventure was a conference-sponsored field trip to hike in some native New Zealand forests. Given that this was a trip for botanists, “hike” turned out to be a very slow stroll as we botanized (the plant-lover’s version of birdwatching) our way into the forest. We started in the lush podocarp-broadleaf  forests of Wainuiomata, which is actually a limited access (and thus protected) water collection area to which we were given special entry. My botanist friends pointed out a whole lineup of native NZ plants, some with both Māori and scientific names, including the iconic ponga or silver tree-fern (Alsophila dealbata), baby-soft rangiora (Brachyglottis repanda), juvenile lancewood (Pseudopanax crassifolius) in its strange spindly form that it eventually outgrows, long-leafed evergreen rewarewa (Knightia excelsa) with bizarre curly pink flowers, five-fingered Pseudopanax, towering mataī trees (Prumnopitys taxifolia, a podocarp), and one of my very own hebe species, Veronica salificolia. Deeper in the forest was a particularly tall mataī under which we ate lunch (but not too close, our guide said, since the wide-spreading roots are sensitive to trampling) bathed in green-dappled light. Many of the bigger trees were heavy with epiphytes, plants that grow up in the canopy on tree branches. We came across a recently downed branch with living epiphytes still clinging to it, including a rare club moss, or Lycopodium, that very much excited one moss researcher.

Our field trip also took us to a slightly different forest, drier with rocky red soil but just as thick with greenery, called Remutaka. Highlights there included an endangered Muehlenbeckia astonii in the carpark (they thrive as ornamental plants) with a classic New Zealand branching pattern, called “divaricate,” with lots of brambly right angles protecting the leaves; manuka flowers, famous for their honey, busy with bees; the nīkau palm (Rhopalostylis sapida), the only palm species native to New Zealand; and another towering tree, northern rātā (Metrosideros robusta).

(I had to message one of said Kiwi botanist friends to remind me of all of these names…I wasn’t there quite long enough for most of them to stick.)

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Nov 28-30

Another serendipitous adventure to put in my treasure box: after the conference finished, I had a few days to kill in Wellington, and I also moved to an AirBnB in a hilly district edging on the sea (and hosted by a very friendly Kiwi couple who seemed to think of their guests as family friends rather than paying guests; they invited me to help myself to the fridge, use their washing machine, and dry my clothes on a rack in their living room while they watched TV). On my first evening there I followed my nose up the hill for a sunset view, expecting a simple neighborhood stroll and instead finding a coastal path that took me all the way out to the bluffs overlooking the ocean, and to one of the most spectacular sunsets of my memory. I could see the peaks of the South Island faintly across the Cook Strait, and flashing airplanes gliding in to land at the Wellington airport a ridge over. (Later, when I flew out of Wellington, I recognized the bluffs I had seen from the ground.) When the sunset faded, I walked back under a crescent moon and an intensely bright Jupiter.

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The next day’s adventure was two-fold. I started by taking the bus through more hills to Otari-Wilton’s Bush, a different kind of botanic garden with a cultivated collection containing only native New Zealand plants and a 100-hectare wild preserve with hiking trails. I wandered the garden and the bush collecting more plant images and names. Reingareinga lily (Arthropodium), the unique kauri tree, cabbage tree, lancewood, more lovely hebes (I wish I could identify them to species), Chatham island forget-me-not, and on one trail, an 800-year-old rimu tree (a podocarp).

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Another bus ride over dappled twisting hilly streets was bookended by a visit to Zealandia, an innovative wildlife sanctuary trying to keep the insidious waves of introduced mammals out and the native birds and reptiles and trees safe inside. A towering heavy-duty fence with periodic traps for possums, rats, ferrets, and other creatures with sharp teeth and big appetites surrounds the 225 hectares of lush forest and reservoir. My friends and I went inside the double set of security gates, got our boots and bags checked for hitchhikers, and walked the trails in search of kaka, hihi, quail, and the star attraction: tuatara. These ancient native New Zealand reptiles look like lizards, but have no close living relatives. Tuatara were almost driven to extinction by rats et al, and are not helped by having slower growth and reproductive rates than virtually any other reptile (they can live to be over 100 years old if unmolested). The only wild populations remaining are on outlying islands where mammals haven’t reached, and Zealandia is one of several attempts to establish breeding colonies on the mainland. The tuatara watched us coolly from their holes, seemingly not too concerned about our mammal status.

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My farewell adventure was made possible by a kind Kiwi couple with whom I had mutual friends through church. They had me for dinner one night and picked me up the next day to tour Cuba St art galleries (one of them is a museum curator), and then dropped me off on one more hike, this one along the coast in Te Kopahau reserve. Unfortunately it was a hot day, and the trail, which I was sharing with four-wheel-drive vehicles, was rather exposed, so this was a less pristine experience than my other wanderings. However, I enjoyed spotting hebes and other plants on the bluffs and abalone shells and seaweed in red-rock tide pools and sinking my feet in the pebbly sand.

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The next day I was on a flight halfway down the South Island to Christchurch. Stay tuned…