#1903 - Microsorum pustulatum ssp. pustulatum - Kangaroo Fern
If you had to describe New Zealand’s climate in one word, that word might be ‘moist’, given the Islands are mountainous roadblocks in the way of every weather front coming across the Pacific, or howling up out of the Antarctic. There’s a reason the Māori-language name of the country is Aotearoa - "land of the long white cloud". @purrdence’s been over there for a month and has only seen the top of a mountain, unobscured by cloud, once, and that was from a plane flying overhead. Admittedly that might also have something to do with the cyclone that’s closed half the railways and major roads.
But even if I’m exaggerating about the climate, New Zealand enjoys a wide variety of large and handsome ferns, so I’m going to be discussing a few.
These ferns, which can grow up to 50cm long, were growing near Huka Falls, where 220,000 liters of water a second roars through a canyon 15m across. AKA hound's tongue, and in Māori: kōwaowao, or pāraharaha, Kangaroo Fern is also known from the moister parts of Eastern Australia, where is presumably where it got that common name. M. pustulatum subsp. howense is endemic to Lord Howe Island. Zealandia has also been suggested as the generic name.
They’re adept epiphytes, common on tree ferns but also branches and trunks of trees, on rocks, logs and occasionally along the ground in wet forests and rainforests. If conditions are suitable, a good garden or terrarium fern.
