![]() On rare occasions a solitary tui would visit the stand, and the teachers would stop their lessons to admire the melodious, sometimes raucous, calls of a nectar-drunk native bird scarcely seen in the poorly forested farmland of the Hamilton basin. Later, after the flowers had fallen and the trees had sprouted leaves, we enjoyed their shade and gathered the long, curiously shaped seed pods with their tiny, hard, yellow, pea-like seeds, which we would use for play money, or, rather, “gold nuggets”, blissfully ignorant of their reputedly toxic properties (see sidebar). With their appearance we knew it would soon be spring, when we would be delighted by the trees’ rich profusion of golden flowers-portents of summer, the end of school and the start of the Christmas holidays. In winter we saw that they were one of the few deciduous native trees, and we would watch them daily for the first signs of new growth, announced by the seemingly magical overnight production of flower buds. Why? Because they changed with the seasons. My friends and I used to sit beneath several large kowhai trees at lunch-time. My first memories of kowhai are from my time at primary school in Hamilton. While birds are considered to be the main pollinators of kowhai, bees can obviously do the job also. t’s not only people who enjoy the kowhai’s flowers. Indeed, as my passenger intimated, so prized are kowhai that many iwi do indeed consider the act of cutting one down-even accidentally-a serious breach of tapu. Around Kawhia Harbour, I have been shown groves of kowhai held to be sacred. One often sees venerable koran growing in the vicinity of old pa sites, kainga, urupa and other waahi tapu, and the trees are a feature of many a marae. ![]() Maori have long esteemed the kowhai for its colourful flowers, a welcome harbinger of spring, and its medicinal properties (see sidebar) also, I imagine, for the wealth of nectar-feeding birds it attracts during its flowering season, which they could harvest. I sincerely hoped so too, for, superstitious or not, I couldn’t help but recollect that when my brother had deliberately cut down a kowhai tree while out in the bush, our grandfather had died and I had ended up in hospital with peritonitis. Ever since then, she told me, things hadn’t gone right, and now she was heading back to the orchard to plant a scion raised from the tree she had felled. Inevitably, conversation turned to this spectacle, and once my passengers had learned I was a botanist, one of them, a young Maori woman, told me sadly that she had breached tapu, having accidentally cut down a kowhai tree whilst helping clear out her elderly nana’s overgrown orchard. It was early spring, and as we passed beside Lake Taupo the kowhai there were in full flower. Some years ago I picked up two hitch-hikers and their dog, all cold and wet, battling their way north along the Desert Road. Written by Peter de Lange and Peter Heenan Photographed by Rob Suisted and Brian Chudleigh
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