#cunoniaceae

Bauera sessiliflora

18-SEP-2025

A 2,518 metres (8,261 ft) tall stratovolcano, ideally positioned to catch every change in the weather coming off the Tasman. As a result it gets up to 11 meters of rain a year, and the winds between the peak and the remains of its predecessor can exceed 130kph.

Naturally, of great importance to the local iwi, and it certainly made an impression of the Europeans too - although a lot of early paintings exaggerate the height.

watercolour by Charles Heaphy, some time between 1839 and 1849.

They named it Mt Egmont, although happily the original name is back to being the official one.

The volcano erupts, on average, every 90 years, with major eruptions every 500. Of considerably more concern are the repeated catastrophic cone collapses that turn most of the volcano into gigantic landslides sweeping fridge-sized boulders and smaller debris dozens of kilometers away from the volcano, and well past the current coastline.

Anyway, while we wait for it to go bang again, visitors can enjoy the fascinating change in vegetation as you go up the mountain. As you get higher and higher, the coastal vegetation is replaced by the goblin forests, contorted mossy woods dominated by Kamahi (Weinmannia racemosa), that developed after eruptions destroyed the preexisting podocarp and Nothofagus forest, and as you go higher the trees are replaced by tussock grasses and later alpine plants.

There are still kiwi in the national park, which is one reason dogs are strictly banned. The introduced stoats continue to be a problem - we saw one on one of the tracks.

There was also this building, a corrugated iron structure noteworthy for being the oldest such building left anywhere in the world. It was originally a fort, and still has gun slits. The windows are new.

Most of the species I saw around the visitors center are were new to me - I could have spent a week just phtographing the incredible lichens in the goblin forest. Here's some that weren't new.

And a few lichens I don't have an ID on.

A common endemic tree in New Zealand, from the Cunoniaceae. Unusually for the genus, which is mostly tropical, it thrives in cool climates all the way up into subalpine forest.

Before the arrival of Europeans, kāmahi was so valuable that it was protected by tapu. Māori were careful not to cut down all the tree’s limbs, lest they or their spouse may suffer serious consequences. Kāmahi bark was a rich source of tannins used to dye cloaks and mats, and to preserve fishing lines. Infusions of the inner bark were also used as a purgative.

The Cunoniaceae are most diverse in Australasia, where they have an excellent fossil record. They possibly evolved in the Cretaceous, which would explain the distribution of some of the genera, but long-distance dispersal is still required to explain others.

Ceratopetalum apetalum

Cotyledons

Ceratopetalum apetalum

Cotyledons