The Dirt: New Zealand’s strange flora
Ask the Californian in the street to name a plant native to New Zealand and you’d likely hear kiwifruit. Understandable, but although it was popularized by New Zealand growers and named for the national bird, the vine with fuzzy brown fruit originated in China and was known as Chinese gooseberry until its rebranding in the 1950s.
Some would come up with New Zealand Christmas tree, New Zealand tea tree or New Zealand flax. Hard-core Tolkien fans might know that the trees the Ents herded in Fangorn Forest in the film version of “Lord of the Rings” were red and silver nothofagus “beeches,” endemic to New Zealand.
Though Ents are scarce these days, New Zealand natives are all around us: city streets, public parks, suburban landscaping, highway medians. Not in California wildlands, though; most are well behaved, without invasive tendencies. Although New Zealand isn’t one of the canonical Mediterraneanclimate regions, many of its plants find coastal California congenial.
New Zealanders were early arrivals on the local horticultural scene. According to Elizabeth McClintock’s “The Trees of Golden Gate Park and San Francisco,” Bay Area nurseries were offering New Zealand Christmas tree, New Zealand tea tree and other antipodean trees and shrubs by the 1860s and 1870.
Major impression
The living plants shipped to San Francisco for New Zealand’s exhibit at the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 made a major impression. John McLaren of Golden Gate Park fame, the fair’s landscaper, brought some prime specimens home when it ended. A massive rimu (Dacrydium cupressinum) tree from the exhibit, an evergreen with little scaly leaves and weeping branches, still thrives in the botanical garden’s New Zealand section.
The New Zealand conifers haven’t caught on in the Bay Area — although both the San Francisco and University of California botanical gardens boast impressive specimens of rimu, kauri (Agathis australis) and others — nor have the southern beeches of Fangorn.
But one has become an iconic San Francisco street tree: the New Zealand Christmas tree, Metrosideros excelsa, pohutukawa to the Maori, with its red bottlebrush flowers and beards of aerial roots. Visiting Hawaiians sometimes mistake it for their native ohia lehua, a different metrosideros.
Unexpected plants attain tree status in New Zealand, including members of the violet family and the world’s only treesize fuchsia. A few have evolved bizarre forms. A lancewood (Pseudopanax ferox) sapling has narrow toothy downward-angled leaves; it looks like a collapsed umbrella. As it matures, the new leaves broaden and tilt up.
It’s been speculated that the young leaves were unpalatable to moas — huge flightless planteating birds, now extinct. Moa browsing might also explain the tightly zigzagging twigs of the wirenetting bush (Corokia cotoneaster), a favorite of California landscapers.
Densely woolly, textured cushion plants are another oddity; the two species known as vegetable sheep, Haastia pulvinaris and Raoulia eximia, have been said (by R.M. Laing and E.W. Blackwell, authors of “Plants of New Zealand”) to “so resemble a sheep, as to deceive the unwary.” Vegetable sheep are a challenge for rockgarden lovers even in New Zealand, but who wouldn’t want one handy to pet?
Hebe standouts
Among the shrubs, the hebes are standouts. With more than 100 species, these are to New Zealand’s flora what manzanitas and ceanothus are to ours. They range from Alpine dwarfs (one, Hebe ochreatus, is popular with garden-railroad buffs) to small trees. Most have showy white-to-purple flowers. Finicky about temperature and drainage, hebes do particularly well in San Francisco. They’ve varied in popularity from cliche to rarely seen.
Overall, it’s a peculiar flora, even minus Ents, if maybe not quite so strange as the islands’ menagerie of kiwis, keas, wetas and tuataras. Three-quarters of New Zealand’s plant species are found nowhere else, although many have sister species in Australia, South Africa and South America — other fragments of the ancient Gondwana supercontinent.
Compared with plant communities in similar latitudes, there are fewer annuals, deciduous trees and insect-pollinated plants (birds and lizards do the job).
While you won’t find most of these plants in the typical nursery, we’ve seen some for sale at botanical gardens, the Dry Garden in Oakland and Annie’s Annuals in Richmond. Next: An honorary “tree,” the famous flax and some other herbaceous plants and grasses.