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Kew magazine
High adventure
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 time-consuming - 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.
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 two-thirds 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 confidence-building experience and one we will draw on as we build up the New Zealand and Australasia collection for the future.
Annette Dalton is the horticultural
manager of Hardy Display at Kew