#blechnaceae

AKA Blechnum penna-marina, Struthiopteris distans, Stegania alpina, Lomaria alpina, Blechnum alpinum, Lomaria linearis, Lomaria pumila, Spicanta pumila, Lomaria parvifolia, Blechnum parvifolium, Lomaria distans, Blechnum hillii, Antarctic hard-fern, alpine water fern and pinque (Chilean Spanish).

Native to Australia, New Zealand, some Pacific and Subantarctic islands, parts of Chile, and parts of Argentina. The fronds may be 25 cm long. An easily propagated and hardy groundcover, surviving temperatures as low as -25C.

Woodwardia fimbriata, Giant Chain fern

Blechnaceae

AKA Parablechnum montanum. Formerly Lomaria procera var. tegmentosa.

A montane and subalpine fern on the main islands, where it is most common on the South Island, but on the Chatham Islands, Antipodes Islands, Auckland Islands, and Campbell Island it grows close to sea-level.

An adaptable species found in podocarp, broadleaved, beech and pine forest, under mānuka and kānuka, in subalpine scrub and herbfield, and in tussock grassland. It grows in rocky gorges, cliffs, amongst rocks, on outcrops, roadbanks and cuttings, on stream banks, near waterfalls, and in fernland and peat bog. In the subantarctic it grows under Metrosideros forest, Dracophyllum scrub and among megaherbs.

Easily propagated and transplanted, and flourishes in most conditions, but prefers a shaded site and a permanently moist, rich soil.

After getting across Cook Strait without being shipwrecked (the weather was actually quite pleasant compared to some of the unholy gales that come through the gap, with the wind merely howling), we started our explorations of Te Waipounamu, the Island of Greenstone Waters. Pounamu is such a beautiful and useful stone that the Māori named the entire island after it.

Europeans called it South Island, or archaically New Munster. It covers 150,437 square kilometres, making it the world's 12th-largest island. We stopped at the Omaka Aviation Museum, which was worth it, but our first night was spent at St. Arnaud, formerly Rotoiti, a tiny alpine village.

It's certainly surrounded by mountains, and shows some really nice alpine geomorphology - hanging valleys left where subsiduary glaciers got cut off by the larger glaciers in the main valley, scree slopes where the greywacke of the mountains is disintigrating, and alpine lakes like Lake Rotoiti itself, formed when the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age and left behind huge piles of pebbles, gravel, and boulders to dam the meltwater.

On the other hand St. Arnaud has also been built right on top of a considerably larger geological feature - the Alpine Fault. This tectonic boundary between the Australian and Pacific Plates runs for over 600km, and is one of the fastest moving faultlines in the world, moving, on average, almost 40mm a year. Geological formations that originally straddled the fault are now 480km apart. Unfortunately most of that movement happens during huge earthquakes every few hundred years - the last big one on the Alpine Fault happens around 1717, rupturing 400km of the fault at once.

Over the last 12 million years a significant upwards element to the fault movement has been added, creating the Southern Alps. Most of what is now the South Island got pushed 20 kilometers up, whereupon New Zealand's weather promptly ground it 16 kilometers back down again. The assorted rubble forms the plains on the east and southern coast, or got swept north by prevailing currents on the west coast. Exposed basement rock on the South Island is mostly greywacke, or heavily metamorphised rocks such as schist from even deeper. That's where the greenstone originally formed.

Anyway, the next big quake will probably trash St. Arnaud completely, and cut every road across the mountains for months. Happily that didn't happen on this trip - @purrdence had enough problems with a cyclone cutting roads and trainlines last time.

The original forest around St. Arnaud is mostly Antarctic Beech (Nothofagus sp.) and forms the basis of a unique and seriously threatened ecosystem. I'll tell you all about that over the upcoming posts.

Here's some species I've covered before.

After Pohokura we spent a couple of days on the west coast of North Island - specifically, in the vicinity of Taranaki/Mt. Egmont, a young stratovolcano that is the most recent volcano in a long sequence of slowly migrating volcanism in the area. The hills to the northwest, and the plugs at the coast at New Plymouth, are all that remain of its predecessors. In fact, the entire ring of flattish and highly fertile land in Taranaki is the result of the repeated catastrophic collapse of the volcanoes over the last 1.75 million years.

The photo below was taken from Cape Egmont 30 kilometers from the volcano. Even out here there are layers of fridge-sized boulders deposited by the giant volcanic landslides.

The plugs at New Plymouth, 1.75 myo.

Historically, the area consisted of a narrow coastal plain covered by bracken, tutu, rewarewa and karaka trees, with anywhere not close to the coast covered in dense forest.

From about 1823 the Māori began having contact with European whalers and flax traders. English settlers were first dropped here in 1841, and within a year were trying to deal with plagues of the rats they brought with them.

The stuff we saw on the volcano itself I'll cover seperately, but there was no shortage of species in New Plymouth, along the coast, at Lake Mangamahoe, and where we were staying.

AKA Parablechnum minus, Blechnum capense var. minor, Lomaria minor, Lomaria procera var. minor and Lomaria procera var. paludosa. Originally named Stegania minor.

Supposedly a small fern found in moist habitat in eastern Australia and New Zealand. These ones certainly a good size, for a ground-dwelling non-tree-fern.