New Zealand - final - Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

FIELDWORK
High adventure
To revitalise our collection of New Zealand plants,
a team from Kew organised an expedition to South
Island’s alpine slopes. Annette Dalton reports
Celmisia traversii,
one of 60 species of
New Zealand daisy,
has russet-edged leaves
Above: Joanne Everson
braved all weathers
to make collections –
even sleet and snow
Top: Annette Dalton
taking field notes in the
shade of an Aciphylla
scott-thomsonii
Above: known as the
South Island edelweiss,
Leucogenes grandiceps
has white woolly flowers
Top: crimson-fruited
Pentachondra pumila
thrives on damp,
peaty heathland
PHOTOGRAPHS: SVEN LANDREIN
Starting and finishing
in Christchurch, the
expedition covered
much of South Island
FRANZ JOSEF
GLACIER
INVERCARGILL
SOUT HERN ALPS
DUNEDIN
ARTHUR’S
PASS
CHRISTCHURCH
The dramatic flower
spike of Aciphylla
kirkii – ripe for
seed collection
Muehlenbeckia
axillaris forms dense
mats of glossy foliage,
with tiny flowers
The Davies Alpine House at Kew has
turned many heads recently and
elicited varied opinions. But its very
existence delights Joanne Everson
and me, as it was the catalyst that sparked
our collecting trip to New Zealand and led
to us tramping up the country’s Southern
Alps in search of seeds and herbarium specimens
in February and March this year.
The Rock Garden at Kew is laid out geographically
and represents the flora of the
world’s alpine regions. However, to make
way for the new Davies Alpine House, the
Australasia and New Zealand section had
to be cleared, and this provided the perfect
opportunity to reassess the collection. In so
doing, Joanne Everson, team leader of the
Rock Garden, soon discovered how difficult
it is to obtain naturally sourced New
Zealand native plants that have adequate
provenance and field data. Kew’s remaining
collection had only 23 naturally sourced
New Zealand plants and, considering that
there are 60 species of Celmisia (New
Zealand daisy) alone, Kew’s New Zealand
alpine collection was in dire straits – a collecting
trip was essential.
Neither Joanne nor I had taken part in a
Kew collecting trip before, let alone organised
or led one, but Mercy Morris of the
Southern Hemisphere Garden at Wakehurst
Place joined us, and so did Sven Landrein,
Sharon McDonald and Dr Dick Brummitt
of the Herbarium, where the New Zealand
collection needed updating. It began to look
like a very exciting project.
Joanne and I soon discovered that Kew
had sent few official collecting trips to New
Zealand, so we had to begin the collection
permit applications from scratch. Most of
our collecting was to be done on Department
of Conservation (DOC) sites, as these
were mostly high mountain areas and gave
Kew the most ethical avenue for collecting.
In New Zealand, 80 per cent of the flora is
endemic, so biosecurity laws are appropriately
strict and the permit application
process complicated. We also had to supply
a target list of all the species we might wish
to collect and negotiate the conditions of our
permit, not only with the DOC but also with
the Maori tribe local to the collection areas.
Making the correct contacts and putting
together our permit application was timeconsuming
– our collection target list alone
took months to compile. We were advised
to omit any species that were rare, threatened,
endangered or had a restricted range.
Our complete list contained 937 species, of
which we hoped to collect roughly one-fifth.
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KEW Autumn 2006 l 19

FIELDWORK
Left: Hebe epacridea,
a dwarf evergreen
shrub, grows in rock
crevices and scree
Top: Astelia nervosa
forms large clumps of
beautiful sword-like
silver foliage
Above: Joanne’s
photographs provide
a valuable record of a
plant and its habitat
Above: it’s easy to see
how Raoulia eximia
got the common name
of vegetable sheep
Top: the spectacular
Franz Josef Glacier
lies in the Westland
National Park
Above: you need to
avoid the sharp spines
when gathering seed
from Aciphylla aurea
Above: the red rata vine,
Metrosideros fulgens,
produces a showy
display of blooms
Above: Annette Dalton
gets down to work
collecting some of the
low-growing species
Above: with large daisy
flowers, Celmisia
spectabilis is endemic
to New Zealand
PHOTOGRAPHS: SVEN LANDREIN
In October 2005, after eight months of
correspondence with New Zealand, Joanne
and I travelled to South Island to complete
our negotiations in person and seek advice
on collecting sites. We hoped to collect in all
of the four conservancies on South Island,
and met with botanists who offered all the
help and facilities we might need. The most
comprehensive help in identifying collecting
sites came from Dr David Given, the curator
at Christchurch Botanic Gardens, who sadly
passed away in November 2005 – we feel
very lucky indeed to have met him.
We also visited Dunedin Botanic Garden
(DBG), which re-awakened a Dunedin–Kew
connection from 100 years ago, when the
Kew-trained curator David Tannock used to
send his gardeners to Kew for training, and
Kew reciprocated. DBG was most helpful
and decided that three staff members would
join us for a week each. We returned to Kew
and finally received our permit – we had three
months to make all the arrangements. Our
expedition (a term that amused the DOC
botanists, as they thought it a little grand)
began on 5 February 2006, when we set off
on our 27-hour journey to Christchurch.
Our collecting trip traversed about twothirds
of South Island, and we collected at
heights of 50–2,000m above sea level. And
some days were long – we rose at 6.30am
and didn’t return to our cars until 9pm. Then
we had to get back to our lodgings, cook
dinner and clean the seeds we’d collected.
We developed a strict procedure in the
field – when we identified a specimen from
which we hoped to collect, we first determined
its species name, then ensured there
were at least five fruiting specimens in the
general area. If there were, we then tested
the seed quality. When we made a collection,
we had to ensure we stuck to the amount our
permit allowed us to collect. Then there were
the field notes – to remind us of all the information
we had to record about each species,
Mercy created an invaluable field-note sheet.
We began our field trip in Christchurch,
and travelled west through Arthur’s Pass,
where our collection sites included Temple
Basin, Dobson Nature Walk, Otira Valley,
Foggy Peak and Craigieburn Forest Park.
These provided a mix of bog plants, forest
dwellers, high alpines and shrubby material,
including cushion plants such as Donatia
novae-zelandiae and Phyllachne colensoi.
When we came across a great example of the
renowned plant known as vegetable sheep,
Raoulia eximia, at 1,715m on Foggy Peak,
our excitement was only curbed by the high
risk of being blown off the scree slope.
The Southern Alps split much of South
Island into wet and dry areas – rainfall in
the Otago region, east of the divide, averages
300mm a year, while in the Fiordland,
west of the Alps, it averages 8m a year. As
we moved south towards the Franz Josef
Glacier, the difference in weather across the
divide became apparent. South of the glacier
it improved for our trip to the Rob Roy
Valley, home of the outstanding Aciphylla
scott-thomsonii. We went on to the Pisa
Conservation Area, where I first came across
the charming Dracophyllum muscoides, and
also to the Rastus Burn Recreation Reserve.
We visited Rastus Burn in October 2005 and
saw a Psychrophila obtusa in flower. So, on our
return, we went to the same spot and found
enough fruiting patches to make a collection.
We continued south and east to Dunedin
Botanic Garden, where Sven, Sharon and
Mercy gave a talk to more than 200 people.
Heading north again, one of our last collecting
days was in the Hinewai Reserve, but
sadly the birds had beaten us to the bounty of
the only fruiting Rhopalostylis sapida (nikau
palm). We eventually arrived in Christchurch
and delivered our specimens to the Allan
Herbarium to be frozen and sent on to Kew.
They were then transferred to the Millennium
Seed Bank at Wakehurst, where they
were put in the dry room to await our return.
Back in England, we divided the 219 seed
collections we made into batches for sowing
or banking. Of the 69 alpine collections
sown, 49 species have germinated so far. The
woodier species will be sown in Wakehurst’s
nursery this autumn, and most will eventually
fill up the New Zealand beds of the
Southern Hemisphere Garden there. Some
will also go to Kew. The New Zealand and
Australasia section of Kew’s Rock Garden
will be completed and ready to receive new
residents by Christmas.
It’s very rewarding to see the new plants
growing on from the seed we collected. And
despite some long, intense days in the field,
we learnt a huge amount and had a lot of
fun. The expedition was a great confidencebuilding
experience and one we will draw
on as we build up the New Zealand and
Australasia collection for the future. n
Annette Dalton is the horticultural manager
of Hardy Display at Kew
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