Scottish Rock Garden Club Forum
General Subjects => Travel / Places to Visit => Topic started by: David Lyttle on September 11, 2011, 11:30:18 PM
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Here are some scenic pictures from a trip to Mihiwaka (561 metres) above the Otago Harbour. No plants as it is still too early in the season for anything to be flowering.
1. Looking down to Port Chalmers across the Otago Harbour to the Otago Peninsula.
2. Looking towards the head of the Otago Harbour. Dunedin city is out of sight on the far right.
3. Looking across to Mt Cargill (with TV transmission tower), Swampy Summit further to the right.
4. Telephoto shot of Mt Cargill
5. Telephoto shot of Swampy Summit. You can see the Northern motorway out of Dunedin more or less dead centre. Photo also shows huge prehistoric landslide with head wall directly below skyline ridge.. The cracks above where the landslide broke away are still visible so I am told that in geological terms it was a relatively recent event.
6. Looking north west across the Siver Peaks to the Rock and Pillar Range.
7. Telephoto shot of the Rock and Pillar Range still showing winter snow.
8. Telephoto shot looking north to the Kakanui Mountains also covered with winter snow.
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Nice day out David. Looks like there could be more snow up there after thee next day or two. Winter took a long time to arrive and now it doesn't want to let go.
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It looks like the Ulex europaeus is flowering well Dave
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Doesn't it always? I have two in a corner of the garden which (I tell myself) I keep because of their magnificent perfume at this time of year but even when we cut them out, we'll always have it here. The woman who "farms"( ???) organically at the end of the road, has 100 plus acres of it in full bloom at present and the pods crack open and distribute all around for 100s of metres. I see the council or someone has sprayed the roadsides by her place but only enough to stop the road going totally to the wild.
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It looks like the Ulex europaeus is flowering well Dave
Dont get me started Steve; I subconciously avoid placing great swathes of it in my photos. I try and avoid photographing that other environmental weed Pinus radiata as well. The DCC keeps planting the latter into regenerating shrubland ( lots of Coprosma tayloriae, Coprosma decurva and Coprosma dumosa)
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Wonderful views, David.
Many thanks, Paddy
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Beautiful pictures of a beautiful part of the world David.
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Oops . Sorry about that . I often get a little excited when I see weeds flowering
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Hi Paddy, David,
I am pleased you enjoyed the pictures It was a great day out, however the weather in typical spring fashion has turned cold and wet for the past few days with fresh snow on the hills.
Steve, I will do a thread on environmental weeds at some stage just for you :). Our northern hemisphere friends will recognise some of their treasured garden plants.
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Fantastic photos of the landscape in New Zealand. It is difficult to reconcile the individual fascination of plants in our gardens with the potential damage they can do in a different environment - I have just bought a dwarf form of Ulex (gallii 'Mizen Head'), which is very attractive, but the damage that U. europeaus brings to the natural landscape in NZ must be deeply frustrating. Considering the vast number of plants that have been introduced to the UK it is interesting how relatively few have escaped and become severe weeds and some that have naturalised have become beautiful additions to the flora.
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Tim,
I attended a lecture last night entitled " Complex relationships with friends and foes: How native plants manage the risks " by a friend who is one of New Zealands foremost ecologists. he told a series of interesting and fascinating stories showing the interdependencies between plants and other biota. It is not surprising that when these relationships are disrupted by human intervention and the introduction of alien species the results can be catastrophic. As an oceanic island New Zealand is a very different place from the UK which more closely resembles continental Europe in its ecology.
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Good Heavens David, I thought you were posting that note this morning, and wondered how on earth Susan's talk could have transmogrified into the one you mention here!
Tim, I believe that our plant police assume that what is a weed in, e.g. the UK, must be a worse weed here. But I saw great (and beautiful) swathes of naturalized Rhodo. ponticum in Wales and Scotland and you're hard put to find it here at all. It is in some gardens and there are plantings of many rhodos in and around Dunedin yet I've never seen a "wild" ponticum among the lot. Perhaps others have seen it naturalizing, but not me. The one that could become a problem for me is R. x Cilpinense which is planted near my seed frames and every year I have hundreds of tiny seedlings appear. I pull them out but always some live to grow on until dug out at a year or two old. One year I potted up a dozen to see how true they came and all did except one which is a deeper, strawberry pink and which I'll take cuttings from this summer.
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Yes, you did have me a bit worried David, especially when I read :Complex relationships with friends and foes.
I did wonder if it had been my alter ego speaking! ;D
Susan
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Yes, you did have me a bit worried David, especially when I read :Complex relationships with friends and foes.
I did wonder if it had been my alter ego speaking! ;D
Susan
I did the posting on Thursday night after returning from your delightful talk on Wisley and the AGS conference hence last night was Wednesday evening.
On the topic of Rhododendron ponticum it certainly has the potential to be a weed here as well - I removed a huge overgrown patch of it from a property I formerly owned in Leith Valley. There are occasional plants of Rhododendron found growing in the wild round Dunedin. We found one such plant growing on Mihiwaka on our visit there. Spanish heath (Erica lusitanica) has become a widespread weed on the hills round Dunedin with little prospect of being able to control it.
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The heath is well established too, along parts of Saddle Hill Road. I see the DCC men in their wisdom have carefully weedkilled around it in places, and left the heath untouched.
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Last Thursday I attended a Department of Conservation open day at Springvale Scientific reserve near Alexandra. The reserve is highly modified which is an unusual situation for a scientific reserve but contains some unique plants that are extremely rare. At one stage the area was occupied by a huge lake ( back in the Tertiary - teeming with crocodiles. Crocodiles are not a problem these days - the place is now teeming with rabbits). There was deposition of sediments in the lake that were high in salts weathered out of the rocks from which they were derived. In the quaternary these sediments were capped by gravels eroded from the surrounding mountains. The area has been worked for gold by sluicing and the salt bearing sediments exposed, The soil is saline and very infertile and supports a unique community of native plans dominated by ephemeral spring annuals, (dominated is perhaps not the corrrect word as the annuals are able to persist in the infertile, saline soil and not be overwhelmed by exotic grasses and weeds.)
1. Springvale site -general view.
2. Looking across to the Old Man Range from the Sprinvale reserve.
3. Looking across the site showing the extent of the gold workings. The original ground surface is on the terrace at the top of the photo.
4. Exposed cross-section of site showing gravel cap above finer silty lake sediments.
5. Remains of gravel layer left after sluicing. The bushes are the exotic Rosa rubiginosa (briar rose). It is more or less the only woody species present on the site.
6. A sarsen stone (or chinaman). These hard stones are quartz sandstone cemented with silica. The grass ar the base of the stone is an endemic Ryditosperma species also now very rare.
7. The mousetail Myosurus minimus subsp. novae-zelandiae, a tiny annual buttercup.
8, 9. Another tiny annual buttercup Ceratocephala pungens. Before human occupation these spring annuals were so abundant they were grazed on by moas. (moa coproliths are full of the remains of these plants)
10. A line up of spring annuals. From left to right, Myosurus minimus subsp. novae-zelandiae, Ceratocephala pungens and the tiny forget-me-not, Myosotis brevis ( formerly Myosotis pygamea var minutiflora).
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More plants
1. Raoulia australis
2. Atriplex buchananii. This is a a salt tolerant species that is found on exposed coastal headlands and less commonly on inland saline sites.
3, 4. The critically endangered cress Lepidium kirkii. This species is found only on these saline sites and is endangered because of the loss of these soils to agriculture ie by cultivation and irrigation. The taproot of this plant can be up to a metre deep.
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A very interesting thread, David!
Your first pictures from Mihiwaka show a homely landscape but those from Springvale show something totally different from anything here.
Speaking of exotics - here Sitka Spruce (Picea sitchensis), Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) and Western Hemloch (Tsuga heterophylla) have been used as forest trees and now threaten to cover the heathland completely. The heath is manmade though, used as pastures, grazed and burned during 5000 years or more.
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Hello Trond,
I was under the impression Acer pseudoplatanus was a native European species. It tends to be weedy here too but the timber is never used for anything. We have problems here with conifers invading the native tussock grassland. The species that causes the most problems is lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) but Pinus radiata and Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menzeisii) which are the backbone of our timber industry have the potential to cause problems as well. I remember attending a lecture by a countryman of yours who said the treeline in Norway was moving north and upslope in response to climatic warming. From memory I think he was talking about birches and willows.
The Ryditosperma species growing at the base of the sarsen stone is Rytidosperma merum.
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David, although Acer pseudoplatanus is a European species it is not a Norwegian. It has been used a lot as a garden and park tree and has spread to all kind of habitats at the west coast especially. Acer platanoides is a native species though.
The treeline is moving upslope, yes, and that is at least two reasons for that. Longer and warmer growing season is one but the more important is lack of grazing animals and use of wood as firewood. The old way of "sætring" (keeping all kind of grazing animals on summer pastures high up in the mountains in the summer and making cheese of the milk) is almost history only. The mountain birch (Betula pubescens ssp. czerepanovii) is common but also spruce (Picea abies) and pine (Pinus sylvestris) go as high as the birch. Where I spend time in summer it is some small pines which grow almost at the highest summit (1212m). The spruce is a "newcomer" in Southern Norway, expanding from Sweden and still spreading westwards through the valleys.
Pinus contorta and Pseudotsuga menziesii is also much used as forest trees here but they haven't spread much yet.
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This is the most fascinating thread and discussion that puts the landscape into a historical perspective, and it is very interesting to compare the behaviour of plants in quite different parts of the world. Even in one's own garden, after many years of working and observation, one gains a small scale vision of ecology and the way plants grow over time. It is even more interesting to hear about the wider scale landscape. Where else would one hear about the coproliths of moas!!
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Tim,
I have just located the paper on the moa coproliths to support my throw away line. It seem that the seeds of Myosurus and Ceratosephala were dispersed by moas browsing on the foliage of these tiny herbs. Lacking a suitable browser/disperser these annuals are now very rare. The post human modification of the landscape by goldmining has provided a suitable habitat albeit in restricted areas for these plants which were once a lot more common than they are now.
Trond,
Your comments on cultural landscapes and "saetring" has interesting parallels in this country. In the drier more arid inland regions of the South Island sheep are pushed up into the mountains to graze on the snow tussock grassland. In the past the tussocks have been burnt to encourage new growth which is more palatable to the stock. In the long term this practise has proved to be unsustainable as the original vegetation cover has been removed and replaced by exotic weeds in the most degraded areas. Hieracium pilosella and Hieracium lepidulum are particularly problematic(that is in addition to invasion by exotic conifers). In effect European cultural practise has not translated particularly well to a totally different ecosystem. After 150 years of farming and pre-european Maori fires these landscapes have become highly modified to the extent that we can now only speculate on what was present prior to human settlement.
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David,
The mountain pastures here have never been burned, just grazed. Sætring has been practised for several hundred years (at least 400) and the result has been lowered treeline and many plants from the valleys have spread into the grazed areas but few exotics have done so.
At the coast the practice of burning and grazing has been going on for 5000 years and formed the nutrient poor heathland. But the heath is now a threatened habitat due to lack of traditional use. Some places farmers are paid to let their sheep graze and a few places they try to burn in the same ways as in the old days.