nature
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Hardly Extraordinary, Nonetheless Heavily Planted: A Brief History of the Chinese Fan Palm in New Zealand
In the last post we learnt that in1865 Sir George Grey sent nikau palms to Ferdinand von Mueller – the Australian government botanist – who then distributed them about the globe. This obviously suited both men: von Mueller furthered his plant exchanges, and as an ‘amateur botanist’ Grey must have felt he was making a…
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Some Rural Pines from a Wairarapa Trip
Recently I spent a week in the Wairarapa, based at Martinborough. To get there I took the train from Wellington to Featherston and then biked the 18 kilometres to Martinborough. While biking through Featherston I couldn’t help but notice two large Pinus radiata about which I made a mental note: ‘worth further attention’. Returning to…
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Some ‘Great Pines’ of Wellington
Paul Cézanne, one of the most original artists of the impressionist movement, produced a number of ‘tree paintings’. Perhaps the most well-known, painted over the six years of 1890-96, is The Great Pine based on a tree in Provence: Source: Paul Cézanne, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons There are a number of pine species endemic…
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The Leaning Araucarian: A Tree Mystery
‘Araucarian’ sounds like some kind of alien, but actually it is a term used for members of the Araucaria family. We’ve met a few representatives in previous posts: Norfolk Island pines (A. heterophylla), which are very common in New Zealand, particularly in the North Island; the Monkey Puzzle tree (A. araucana) from Chile and Argentina,…
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Outstanding in the Paddock: A Pauahatanui Macrocarpa
As readers of previous posts will know, I’ve grown fond of macrocarpas in all the shapes and sizes they manifest in the New Zealand landscape. This short post reports on another one I recently chanced upon. I had walked up to the historic St Alban’s Church in Pauahatanui which sits atop a small hill, and…
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A Canary Island Combo
The last few posts have been on Phoenix palms, and we’ll return to the question of why their removal is now increasingly common, but before that a bit of an interlude is useful. This will focus on a different tree endemic to the Canary Islands – Dracaena draco – but just by chance there were…
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The Monkey Puzzler
In the course of searching for historical information on the Norfolk Island Pines of Patea Cemetery (see the previous post) I came across an article discussing ‘the shelter problem’ in the Patea region. The anonymous author uses phrases like ‘salt-storms’ and ‘southerly busters’ to convey a serious wind problem. After suggesting that ‘it behoves. all…
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Patea Cemetery Trees: A circa story
I made a quick trip to Hamilton in the last week and on the return to Wellington made a point of calling into Patea Cemetery. This wasn’t because I have relatives buried there, rather it stemmed from Google maps showing two Phoenix palms in the cemetery. I have been researching the possible use of the…
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Photogenic ‘Beat-Up Macs’
In an unplanned manner, previous posts have often featured what New Zealanders know as ‘macrocarpa’, or as they are called elsewhere, ‘Monterey Cypress’.The latter name is because it is Monterey, California, where the cypress has the smallest extant range of any North American conifer. Included in that small area is the Lone Cypress of Carmel…
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Pinus moribundus and the porcini
During Covid lockdown my elder daughter moved back into the family home to stay until things returned to something approaching normal. It was acceptable to go out for short walks during the lockdown, as long as you followed social distancing rules. When my daughter went for her walks, often in the close-by Wellington Botanic Gardens,…
