Impressions of Our Initial Stay in New Zealand

Dan and Nancy Santee gave me a travel diary for Christmas and I've been using it to record the new birds and plants I've seen on this trip. It's inspired me to write about our trip, too, so I'm starting a travel blog. Here goes...

Tom posted photos from our cottage in Tutukaka the other day. He's also taken some other shots from a boat trip we took to the Poor Knights Islands where he went snorkeling. We had a really nice time although Tom managed to sunburn his bald spot and the back of his neck. He'll have to wear a hood with his short wet suit the next time. I hid under the deck awning watching the local birds and sea life and emerged unscathed. One of the photos he took shows our resort from the water.

It's hard not to be envious of the local gardens. We're in manuka territory. Along with the related kanuka tree they're the source of the world's most sought after honey. There's a huge kanuka built into the middle of our cottage deck – we've just missed the flowering period but we can see fruits forming. The tree trunk is about 36” in diameter and probably 30' tall. Weeks ago it must have been completely covered with clusters of tiny, white flowers with bright red pollen stems. The high winds in the area send its tiny fruits clattering onto our tin roof and deck making it sound like rain pounding down. The red flower filaments have blown into the corners of the car park – when I picked up a tuft of them it felt like an old fashioned metal pot scrubbing pad.

There are also a couple of flowering branches left on a couple of the local Pohutukawa, huge, multi-stemmed native trees that can grow more than 80' tall. They produce masses of scarlet blooms from November to January but since the heaviest flower production is in late December they're also known as New Zealand Christmas trees. Someone has poisoned a couple of them farther up the coast and it's caused a huge uproar. The native Maori religion considers the trees spirit guides to the next life so killing them has a lot of cultural impact. The police think some idiot who wants a better view of the sea is the culprit. 

There's also a lot of native mountain flax here. The plants resemble yuccas with clumps of thick, pointed leaves growing about five or six feet tall – each clump grows eight feet or more in diameter and sends up spikes of bright scarlet flowers about the same time as the Pohutukawa trees. The skeletal stalks soar about ten feet in the air and are filled with seed pods that look like brown string beans. Moths pollinate the flowers which have tubes at least three inches long.

Moths are the only native pollinators in New Zealand - the honey bees are imports and so are the monarch butterflies floating through the countryside. Nurseries here sell milkweed plants complete with tiny monarch caterpillars and it appears they've managed to establish themselves in the wild. I don't know if they're the same as the butterflies at home - monarchs are native to many parts of the world. Whatever they are they seem happy and thriving.

 

The most noticeable flowers here are all invasives. Agapanthus from South Africa have naturalized everywhere – they fill the roadsides, culverts and the hillsides with tons of white and purple flowers. South African crocosmia has taken root here as well. Their bright orange blossoms pop out between agapanthus clumps and in some places crocosmia in flower runs for hundreds of feet along local creeks. It's maddening to see how happy they are - I struggle to keep a couple of pathetic examples in our back garden because the hummingbirds love them, and I cheer single flower stems. Cannas have escaped the gardens here, too. There are colonies of them that cover twenty feet or more between runs of agapanthus and crocosmia. Most of them are tall with buttery yellow blossoms. Garden specimens are more likely to have orange blooms.

Out of all of the floral display, however, I'm most covetous of the Nikko blue hydrangeas. They are huge, most about six feet tall and at least as wide and absolutely covered in flowers. When I was first in New Zealand in the 1980's the Japanese would ship seedling nursery azaleas here because they would grow so much larger so much faster in New Zealand than in Japan. They should have tried hydrangeas instead. One spot has them as a hedge – they are almost solid blue right now.