Introduction

ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book provides useful descriptions alongside simple yet beautiful historical illustrations. Anyone will be able to find and observe some of these plants, appreciate their beauty and quirks, learn their stories, and discuss them with friends and whānau.

The fifty plant species are listed by growth form, with ferns first, followed by herbs, vines and, finally, shrubs and trees. Within each group, species are ordered alphabetically by scientific name. An index of species names is provided at the back.

The illustrations are based on sketches by Sydney Parkinson, who was the artist on board HMS Endeavour during the 1768–71 expedition led by Captain James Cook. Parkinson’s field drawings were made from fresh plant specimens collected in the southern hemisphere by botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander. Sadly, Parkinson died on the return voyage, having contracted malaria in Java. After the voyage, Banks employed five artists to complete Parkinson’s sketches, and eighteen engravers to create exquisite copperplate line engravings from these drawings. These plates are now held by the National History Museum in London. There have been just two occasions on which prints have been made from these plates. The first, in the late nineteenth century, as sets of black and white proof prints; and the second, in the 1980s, when an elaborate enterprise was undertaken to produce limited edition sets of 743 colour prints. These are collectively called Banks’ Florilegium.

Te Papa holds a set of the black and white engravings, gifted to the Colonial Museum in the 1890s. These were originally intended to illustrate Thomas Kirk’s The Students’ Flora of New Zealand and the Outlying Islands (1899), the first book about the flora of Aotearoa by a resident botanist. Unfortunately, Kirk died before the book was published and the prints were not included. It seems appropriate, then, that over one hundred years later they are published here with the same desire to make the plants of Aotearoa better understood and appreciated by the amateur botanist. These prints are the perfect illustrations for Native Plants of Aotearoa owing to their beauty, scientific accuracy,

12

THE PLANTS

BUTTERFLY FERN

Asplenium flabellifolium

The three common names of this fern – butterfly, necklace and walking fern – highlight its unique form. Butterfly fern refers to the fan-like shape of its pinnae (the species name flabellifolium means ‘fan-shaped leaves’), which resemble multiple butterflies hovering along the rachis, or stem. The curved fronds also resemble the beads of a long, curved necklace. Finally, the fronds give rise to new plants at the tips of the rachis, revealing the secret to the slow march of the walking fern.

Habitat and distribution: Dry rocky habitats in forest, shrubland and grassland of lowland and montane areas throughout Te Ika-a-Māui North Island and Te Waipounamu South Island. Also native to Australia.

Description: This fern has short, erect, scaly rhizomes. Its looping fronds are narrowly linear, up to 50cm long, with a red-brown rachis. The middle third of the rachis bears the leafy portion of the frond, which is up to 30cm long and is divided into 4–25 pairs of pinnae. The pinnae are light green, flaccid, often prostrate, up to 2mm long and 2mm wide, and fan-shaped with rounded tips and toothed margins. The rachis extends up to 20cm beyond the pinnae and may be rooting at the tip. The spore-producing sori are located along the veins and away from the pinna margins.

17