NZ field trips December 06

[t00lie]

Southland Coast NZ part 1

Last weekend a small number of our alpine garden group visited Awarua Bay on the southern coast.We had the company of fellow forumist Howard Clase and his wife Leila on holiday all the way from the island of Newfoundland Eastern Canada.
We saw the following---

[t00lie]

Part 2
Some more pics of the trip with a couple thrown in from a quick visit to the area today.

Finally --Howard with support from Leila gave an interesting talk and digital slide presentation to a larger group that night on their participation in the Newfoundland Wildflower Societys week long botanical trip .July 06 of a coastal area in Newfoundland.
Cheers Dave

[Maggi Young]

Hello, Dave! Sounds like a good time had by all! And a talk from Howard and Leila, too?  It's amazing how far the SRGC forumists will go for a get together, ain't it? !! A pleasure to accompany you from my home as ever! Thanks!

[Lesley Cox]

Hi Dave, these are very nice and I'm glad you had a chance to meet the Clases. I had planned to go to their 5.30pm talk here in Dunedin but at the last minute - well, about an hour beforehand, the Chair of the Trust which employs me wanted me at a no-notice meeting at the same time so I couldn't go. It wasn't the usual meeting night so I wasn't pleased. I guess Howard will rejoin us when they get home again.

I think the two thelymitras are different species. The white is T. longifolia and the blue is probably T. venosa, but maybe David can throw more light. It's a very fine blue, the one you photographed.

[David Lyttle]

Hello Dave, Howard and Leila gave an excellent talk in Dunedin as well. I took them up Flagstaff and it was blowing fairly hard so we did not linger. I am in Adelaide at the moment and there is not much in the way of alpines here with temperatures in the high 30s. Here is a relative to our manuka and an Australian Cordyline related to our cabbage tree. When you take out the Eucalypts and some other major groups it remarkable how many plants from New Zealand and Australia are closely related. The alpine floras are very closely related with some species, eg Pentacondra pumila, and several genera, Celmisia, Aciphylla in common.They have big possums here as well - so big they are not too good a climbing trees!

[fermi de Sousa]

We have an oversupply of those "ground possums" despite the drought, so feel free to take a few home with you, David!
The closeness of our Alpine floras does give us a sense of togetherness despite the behaviour of our respective sporting teams!
The terrestial orchids also have cousins on this side of the Straits, though the best probably come from Western Australia. Are there NZ Stylidiums? Our east coast has various forms of S. graminifolium but the ones form WA are absolutely stunning.
cheers
fermi

[David Lyttle]

Hi Fermides, We do no have any NZ Stylidiums to the best of my knowledge. Plenty of Pterostylis, Corybas and other small terrestial orchids. The seeds are light enough to get blown across the Tasman consequently there are records of some Australian species growing on the western side of NZ. Our orchids as a whole are not very spectacular. The Thelymitras that Dave photographed in this thread are perhaps the most colourful that we have. We have enough possums of the arboreal kind that I would love to repatriate. I am doing my bit by presenting my Australian relatives with possumfur/merino blend socks.

[Lesley Cox]

Nice to see that picture of you Fermi. It's so long since I was with you that I'd forgotten what you looked like. But I'll recognize you again in April when I go over there.

I do hope the Victorian bushfires are keeping away from you and all my friends in the Dandenongs. Poor Melbourne looks as if it's being thoroughly kippered! The area so far burned (over 200,000 hectares,) is appalling. Hopefully there will be a change in the weather soon with some rain. Too much to hope for?

When I was last in Melbourne I brought home a packet of seed of Leptospermum lanigerum, an Australian species of our "manuka" or "ti tree." It's in flower now, a very slim, upright bush with attractive pinkish white flowers and very pubescent foliage. I'll take a picture tomorrow. Its habit suggests a hedge coming on as I have around 20 plants.

[Paddy Tobin]

David,

Delighted to see, among the other excellent photographs, one of a pterostyllis sp. A gardening friend gave me a small plant some years ago and it has grown on very successfully over the past number of years, now filling a big pot. It's an interesting more than spectacularly beautiful plant but one I am delighted to grow as it gives me great pleasure by its ease of cultivation and its reliable flowering year after year.

Can you please describe the growing conditions, particularly the soil and moisture levels.

Paddy

[t00lie]

Hello Paddy --My apologies for the delay .

As you can see from my pic the Pterostylis sps. are growing in amongst very short turf/ creeping shrubs on raised areas away from the bogs.While they are in full sun i presume the constant winds keep temps. cool.

Under the extremely short turf /decaying humus cover the soil is clayish with smooth white gravel ranging in size from about a persons small fingernail up to about large marbles,(the ones we used to play marbles with as kids).How's that for a scientific description then ) .At a guess i'd say the ratio of gravel to soil is about 15%.

We live only 20ks west on the coast from the area in question so i guess the rainfall stats. for our city apply.We receive a total of about 1100mm p.a.Rain falls more or less evenly every month .There is generally no defined draught period.

Hope that helps.
Cheers Dave.

[Paddy Tobin]

Dave,

Many thanks - a perfect description of conditions for the pterostylis.

When I received the plant originally it was potted in almost complete sand and I have continued with that compost or one with very little besides sand since then. I have found the ptersotylis a very easy plant to grow, certainly thriving under my neglect and flowering each year without fail while bulking up at the same time.

You describe the soil as clayish which is in sharp contrast really to the compost I have been using. It goes to show really that plants are capable of thriving under a wide range of conditions and that we frequently overworry about our care of plants which may not need the level of attention we give them at all.

Many thanks for the information and for the very interesting photographs and accounts. It's a great benefit of the forum that we can read of such interesting outings and experiences from across the globe.

Many thanks, Paddy

[HClase]

It's taken us (me especially) longer to get sorted out and return our biological clocks to Newfoundland Standard Time (3.5 hours behind GMT) than we'd expected.  We had a wonderful time in NZ.  We deliberately decided to restrict our travels to S. Island, except for a short excursion to Wellington and mostly the southern part of S. Is. at that.  We were impressed with the botanical gardens provided at public expense in all of the larger towns (although we wished the native plant sections had been better labeled in most cases), but it was odd to be looking at all these strange plants with the old familiar British birds singing in the background.  The more or less wild places that stick best in our memories were the West Coast north of Greymouth, Hugh Wilson's Hinewai regeneration area on the Banks Peninsula, our trip up Flagstaff with Dave Lyttle, the afternoon near Invercargill with Dave Toole and his group, and, perhaps best of all, a visit to Ulva Island (off Stewart Is) with Peter Tait. This last showed what the original forest was like, and there were no blackbirds or chaffinches - nor, sadly, any moas!  There was also a wonderful private garden, Maple Glen, near Invercargill, although that was mostly non-natives.  Many thanks to all the people we met and gave us help - mostly forum contacts.

Here are a few of my pictures from the Invercargill trip to supplement Dave's, a few things that we most remember.  There was another sundew, which I think is Drosera binata, just unfurling its tentacles, and amazing blue flowered bladderwort (Utricularia monanthos (all ours are yellow) and finally a tiny fern that Leila found which was so similar to our smallest that we didn't need local help with the ID, Schizaea australis we think, although it may have been renamed - ours, S. pusilla, is only half the height of this 4" one though.  Like ours the previous year's fronds persist, they are the grey ones and this year's are brown.  If any of these names need "improving" please let me know.

[Paddy Tobin]

Howard,

What a delight to view your images. The sundew and the bladderwort are outstanding, a fabulous blue in the bladderwort and your photograph of the sundew is simply stunning. Many thanks. The schizea leaves me cold, I'm  afraid, but it is interesting to see nonetheless.

By the way, Waterford in south-east Ireland has long standing connections with Newfoundland as it was the destination of many of our emigrants, especially those with a fishing background.

Many thanks, Paddy

[Lesley Cox]

Hello Howard,
         So pleased you enjoyed New Zealand and welcome back to the Forum. I was very sorry to have missed you altogether - beyond my control - especially as we stay-at-homes have few chances to meet other members of AGS or SRGC. Hopefully you'll come back some time?

I think the Utricularia may be U. monanthos. According to the NZ Flora, the other doesn't grow quite so far south as that. I love the little blue aprons.

[HClase]

Thanks Lesley, I had forgotten to look there, that fits the description better too as well as the distribution. - I've changed it.  Sorry to miss you, you'll have to come down here one July and join in a WFSNL field trip.

As far as the Schizaea is concerned Paddy, no it's not beautiful, but it has a special significance for us since we spent years looking for our "Curly grass fern", S. pusilla and have finally got our eyes in for it, so we were pleased to find it more or less right away in NZ.  As you say it's interesting - but not really an alpine either!  I suspect that like ours it's often overlooked.   As you say there are lots of people of Irish decent here and a lot from Devon too, where my family come from, although they mostly came a couple of hundred years before us.  In many places they still keep the original accents and don't sound at all like Canadians.

By the way, as you can see, I finally succumbed to buying a genuine (made in Australia) NZ squashy bush hat as worn by many tourists!  I think it will be quite useful here too, where else do you need a warm, waterproof sunhat, (now, if they could make them blackfly repellant ....)?   The picture was taken in Christchurch botanical garden which has the biggest trees we've ever seen.