General Subjects > Travel / Places to Visit
NZ field trips February 2007
Paddy Tobin:
David,
Beautiful photographs all three, enjoyed them, many thanks.
Paddy
t00lie:
David --i wonder if you know this native Gastrodia sps. I was out at a friends place just last Saturday morning cutting up firewood for winter when i was invited to view the plant below growing up through gum leaf litter.
We carefully dug down to find the plant appeared to growing off a root of a nearby tree.Besides Gums being in the vicinity there was also a substantial native Beech .Looks similar in shape to your Orchid but lighter in colour.
Cheers Dave.
David Lyttle:
Hi Dave,
Your plant is certainly a Gastrodia but as to the species I would be just guessing. It could be cunninghamii which can be a variable plant but there are other species recognised. Gastrodia orchids are not that rare and sometimes turn up in surprising locations. I have observed it growing in Dunedin in a shrub bed next to one of the University tower blocks in a completely urban environment.
A few more pictures, sorry about the drip feeding but it is past my bedtime. The first is a tarn at the head of Freehold Creek. The figure in the foreground slightly right of centre gives some idea of scale. It had stopped raining at this point but had not completely cleared but continued to improve over the next few hours. The bluffs on the upper left of the picture are absolutely covered with Raoulia eximia like daisies in a lawn. We crossed the ridge between the two bumps on the right. There is a big scree basin at the head of the creek which is obscured by the spur coming down from the central bump. We found Lobelia roughii and Haastia sinclairii growing in the screes there. They tend to be abundant localised areas. I think they are very sensitive to small changes in the environmental conditions
A couple of plants from lower down in the valley above our first campsite, Celmisia walkeri and a Euphrasia I have not been able to identify. I had to terminate this particular photographic session at that site because it started raining and we had to move on.
Also a picture of Haastia sinclairii found just below the pass on the ridge. Elevation was about 1800 metres. The plant was growing on a rock outcrop on the leftmost of the two patches of snow visible in the first picture.
Hope this gives people some idea of the enviroment in which these plants are found.
David Lyttle:
If you want to photograph scree plants you first need to find them. Screes are not uniform as the photos show. The scree plants are fairly fastidious in their choice of habitats.
Photo 1 is looking down on Lake Ohau from the crest of the Ohau Range. Elevation shown in this series photos is from 1800 to 1900 metres
Photo 2 is looking back across our route from the saddle at the head of Freehold Creek that we used to gain access to the crest of the range. The reddish rock is highly weathered and supports very little in the way of vegetation. Plants are found on gravelly patches between the large angular boulders and on rock outcrops on the ridges.
Photo 3 is of a snow melt tarn occupying a little basin below another saddle up to the right.
Aciphylla dobsonii grows on these blocky screes and forms cushions up to a metre across. This year none of the plants were flowering.
Raoulia youngii is also a very characteristic plant of these high screes though it tends to favour finer debris.
Other plants found here are the forget-me-not Myosotis traversii and Epilobium pycnostachyum.
These high alpine plants are quite extraordinary and it would be very difficult to duplicate the conditions under which they grow anywhere else.
David Lyttle:
Here are some more plants, not all high alpine specialists, but quite happy growing on ridge crests and rock outcrops at high elevations.
Melicytus alpinus, a shrub from the family Violaceae.
Hebe pinguifolia in one of its several iterations with a close up showing the flowers.
Hebe epacridea struggling a bit at this altitude.
The small vegetable sheep Raoulia eximia with a close up of a flowering plant showing the dark coloured flowers. This plant commonly grows in crevices in frost-shattered rocks but these particular plants were growing much lower down on an old lateral moraine. This made photographing them much easier needless to say
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version