- Kahikatea

A tree that was growing on the side road next to the Mill House. It happened to be festooned with an AMAZING display of Beard Lichen.

Anyway -

AKA White pine, katea, kaikatea, koroī, kōaka, kahika, and kāī (for the young tree). First described botanically by the French botanist Achille Richard in 1832 as Podocarpus dacrydioides. Dacrycarpus means 'tear shaped fruit', and dacrydioides refers to its similarity to the related podocarp Dacrydium.

Adult trees have dull green overlapping scale leaves while juvenile have needle-like leaves, often with a bronze hue.

New Zealand's tallest tree, up to 65m in height. Formerly dominant in damp fertile areas on both islands, where it grew in spectacular stands including in swamps. Unfortunately 'damp and fertile' is also prime dairy country, and the timber was used for Māori watercraft and tools, and by Europeans for wood pulp, barrels, and butterboxes, being white and odorless. Populations in most of the country have been decimated as a result.

In Māori mythology kahikatea is a child of Tāne, the god of forests and birds, and Hine-wao-riki, and was an important source of wood timber, tattoo dye, chewing gum, and berries for food. The Māori sometimes had to climb more than 30 m to reach the latter. A decoction or steam bath of the leaves was used as a cure for internal complaints.

A Kahikatea tree can produce 800kg of seed a year. The seeds have fleshy attachments called receptacles which encourage birds such as kererū and tūī to eat and disperse them. The trees also support a spectacular range of epiphytes - 100 different species have been recorded on a single tree.

Threats to the trees, beyond land-clearing and logging, include drought, invasive willows which occupy their preferred habitat after disturbance, and seed predation by introduced rats and mice. New Zealand had neither until the arrival of humans.

GINKGOOPSIDA

Ginkgoales - Ginkgoaceae

Ginkgo biloba

PINOPSIDA

Pinales - Araucariaceae

Araucaria araucana monkey-puzzle Wollemia nobilis Wollemi Pine

Cupressaceae

Cryptomeria japonica sugi Hesperocyparis macrocarpa Monterey Cypress Libocedrus bidwillii Pāhautea Sequoia Redwood Sequoiadendron giganteum giant sequoia Taxodium distichum baldcypress

Pinaceae

Pinus pinaster maritime pine Pseudotsuga menziesii Douglas-fir

Podocarpaceae

Dacrycarpus dacrydioides kahikatea Dacrydium cupressinum rimu Halocarpus bidwillii bog pine Pectinopitys ferruginea Miro Phyllocladus alpinus mountain toatoa Podocarpus laetus Hall's totara Podocarpus nivalis snow totara

Taxaceae

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.

AKA Prumnopitys ferruginea, and originally Podocarpus ferrugineus. 'ferruginea' derives from the rusty colour of dried herbarium specimens. Miro comes from the Proto-Polynesian word milo - the Pacific rosewood (Thespesia populnea) found on tropical islands far to the north.

A podocarp endemic to New Zealand, growing in lowland terrain and on hill slopes throughout the two main islands and on Stewart Island.

It can live to about 600 years in age, and 25m in height, with a trunk up to 1.3 m diameter. Like other podocarps, the fruit is fleshy and berrylike, and spread by birds such as the New Zealand Pigeon.

Formerly known as red pine. Happily the Māori name rimu is now in common usage. That name derves from the Polynesian term limu, a generic term for edble seaweeds, which the tree's foliage were reminiscent of, although that term was itself derivied from Proto-Austronesian's *limut meaning "moss". The scientific binomial refers to the cypress-like leaves and droplets of resin.

A large evergreen podocarp conifer endemic to New Zealand. Can reach 60m in height and 1000 years in age. In mast years the groves are especially productive of the orange protein-rich fruit and seeds, and are essential for the breeding of the flightless Kākāpō parrots.

Māori originally used the inner bark to treat burns and cuts, and the resinous heartwood of rimu (called māpara or kāpara) for wooden items such as combs and fernroot beaters, and it is still popular for the production of high quality furniture. However, many of Aotearoa's original rimu groves have been destroyed, and recent government policies only allow limited logging on private land. Stumps and root wood, from trees felled many years before, are used in wood turning.

Slow to establish, with fairly high moisture requirements, but a widely grown ornamental in New Zealand.