The first voyage to New Zealand

Louis Isidore Duperrey (1786-1865), a friend of d'Urville's and senior to him in the navy, drew up a plan for a voyage of discovery. This was eventually accepted by the authorities, and the Coquille sailed for southern waters in August 1822, with Duperrey as commander and Dumont d'Urville second-in-command as executive officer. The voyage lasted two years and seven months, with the Coquille sailing about 73,000 miles (117,500 kilometres) from Toulon to the Canary Islands, Brazil, around Cape Horn, up the west coast of South America, then to New Guinea, the Moluccas and down to Port Jackson (Sydney). They reached the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, on 20 March 1824 and stayed there until 17 April. The return journey from New Zealand was via New Guinea, the East Indies, around the Cape of Good Hope to the Mediterranean, and back to Toulon in March 1825.

Plate 9 Cyathea dealbata (ponga or silver tree fern)

One of New Zealand's best-known plants, with a leaflet that is the national emblem for sporting teams and the armed forces, the silver tree fern occurs in lowland to montane forest throughout New Zealand, including the Chatham Islands. It is also found on Lord Howe Island. The trunks, clothed with the persistent bases of leaf stalks, reach up to ten metres high. The name "silver fern" derives from the silvery-white colour of the undersurfaces of the leaflets, which are bright green above (and green underneath on very young plants). The rows of reddish-brown hemispherical objects between the margin and midrib on the underside of each leaf segment, shown near the top of the plate, are known as indusia. Each encloses a mass of sporangia, and each sporangium releases a mass of spores when the indusium withers under dry conditions. In the enlarged, uncoloured drawing at lower right, sporangia are shown covered (left) by two indusia and, at right, after they have withered. The enlarged drawing at left shows these same features at a lower magnification. A portion of the entire leaf (frond) is shown in the coloured part of the illustration, which is from Atlas Botanique of Voyage de I'Astrolabe (1826-1829). It was drawn by Vauthier and engraved by M. Mougeot, who also did some engravings for the botanical Atlas of d'Urville's last voyage.

page break

Plate 9 Cyathea dealbata (Forst. f.) Swartz. (silver tree fern) M. Vauthier (in d'Urville's Voyage de I'Astrolabe 1826-1829)

The voyage resulted in the discovery of some islands, improved map making and the collection of a vast number of biological specimens. It was achieved without the loss of a crew member. There were others on board who contributed to the biological work on the voyage, in addition to Dumont d'Urville, who was very knowledgeable, extremely hard working and an avid collector. Réne Primèvere Lesson (1794-1849), doctor and pharmacist on the Coquille, and M. Garnot were, with d'Urville, responsible for zoological collecting on the voyage. D'Urville's chief interest in that field was entomology. He was in charge of botanical collections and was assisted by Rene Lesson, who made drawings on the spot of plants too delicate to be preserved. Other scholarly crew members who assisted with scientific work on the voyage included ensigns Charles Hector Jacquinot (1796-1879) and Victor Charles Lottin (1795-1858). Although the Coquille was in New Zealand for only three weeks, d'Urville was much impressed with the country and keen to return and explore the whole coast.

The Coquille received a warm welcome on its return to France, and Charles X ordered that an account of the voyage be published on a lavish scale. This appeared in the form of eight volumes and a five-volume atlas of illustrations, as Voyage autour du monde, Exécuté par Ordre du Rot, Sur la Corvette de Sa Majesté, La Coquille, pendant les anees 1822, 1823, 1824 et 1823, under the general authority of Duperrey. The historical narrative of the voyage (Part historique) was incomplete and ended before the arrival in New Zealand. The botanical section (Botanique), under the general authorship of Dumont d'Urville, was published in two volumes. It included contributions from Adolphe Théodore Brongniart (1801-76), who has been described as the leading French taxonomist of the nineteenth century, and Baron Jean Baptiste Geneviève Marcellin Bory de Saint-Vincent (1778-1846), a geographer, explorer and naturalist. The first volume (Cryptogamie) described some lower plant groups (algae, lichens, lycopods and ferns) and the second (Phanérogamie), which was published in an incomplete form,

page 49

Plate 10 Cyperus ustulatus (coastal sedge)

This member of the sedge or rush family is quite similar in appearance to the classical papyrus {Cyperus papyrus), the stems of which provided paper in ancient times. There are about 550 species of Cyperus, only one of which occurs in New Zealand. Cyperus ustulatus is found in lowland regions, near rivers and on moist ground, especially near the coast, throughout the North Island and parts of the South Island. It occurs too on the Kermadec, Chatham and Three Kings Islands. For some time Cyperus ustulatus was known as Mariscus ustulatus. This illustration is from the botanical atlas of Voyage de l'Astrolabe (1826-1829) and was drawn by Vauthier. The engraving was made by Madame Rebel.

The enlarged section at lower left shows part of an inflorescence of sedge flowers. Figure 2 shows a single flower with three stamens, each bearing terminal pollen sacs, and three central filamentous stigmas to which pollen adheres. Figure 3 shows the central female part of the flower, with three stigmas attached to a cylindrical style, which is attached at its base to the ovoid ovary. A single seed develops within each ovary.

page 50

described seed plants. These volumes appeared between 1827 and 1834, at first in sixteen separate parts. The Atlas, which was published between the same dates, had two parts devoted to botany. The first illustrates lower plants and consists of forty plates (thirty-nine in some copies). Plates 1 to 24 (hand-coloured engravings) illustrate seaweeds (algae) and were drawn by Bory de Saint-Vincent. The other plates, by Pancrace Bessa (1772-1835), a botanical artist at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, were uncoloured and included two New Zealand ferns that were described as new species in the text by Bory de Saint-Vincent. These were Polypodium eleagnifolium (now Pyrrosia serpens) and Lindsaea lessonii (now Lindsaea cuneata var. lessonii). It has been established that another fern, Grammitis scoplopendrina, described as a new species from New Zealand, was not in fact collected there. The second set of illustrations, covering seed plants, consisted of sixty-seven plates numbered from 1 to 78 with plates 55, 57, 58, 63, 65 to 67, 72 to 74, 76 not published. These too are superb engravings, uncoloured. Pancrace Bessa drew the first fifty plates, the others were by Joseph Decaisne (1807-82), a Belgian botanist attached to the National Paris Museum of Natural History. The only New Zealand plant to be described in the text, also illustrated in the Atlas, was Lampocarya affinis, a sedge that is now known as Morelotia affinis.

page break

Plate 10 Cyperus ustulatus A. Rich, (coastal sedge) M. Vauthier (in d'Urville's Voyage de VAstrolabe 1826-1829)

The second voyage

During his absence from France on the Coquille, d'Urville's first child, a son, had died. His promotion to commander in November 1825 gave financial relief to his family, and d'Urville became eager to return to the Pacific. He was commissioned to take the same vessel back there and to continue with exploration and scientific research. At Dumont d'Urville's request, the Coquille was renamed the Astrolabe. The previous Astrolabe, under the command of La Perouse (1741-88), had disappeared in 1788 and d'Urville was ordered to search for evidence of the ship and the fate of its crew. Although d'Urville did find relics of La Perouse's voyage (anchors, cannon balls and iron utensils) at Vanikoro (lying between the Fijian and Solomon Islands), it was an Englishman, Captain Dillon, who discovered the wreck of the missing vessel at Vanikoro in March 1828. There seems little doubt that after the shipwreck La Perouse and his crew were massacred by the natives.

In April 1826 the Astrolabe sailed from Toulon on a three-year cruise, which was to be the greatest achievement of d'Urville's life. He sailed to Australia and New Zealand via the Canary Islands, Trinidad, the northeast coast of South America, and south of the Cape of Good Hope. The mapping of reefs and islands close to shore is a hazardous venture in a sailing ship, but one that d'Urville relished. Officers who were with d'Urville on the previous voyage included Jacquinot (now a lieutenant and second-in-command) and Lottin. Although it has sometimes been stated that d'Urville was also accompanied on this voyage by R. P. Lesson, who had been on the page 51 Coquille, it was in fact his younger brother, Pierre Adolph Lesson (1805-88), who served as surgeon (second class) and naturalist on this voyage. Lesson used his second christian name in preference to the first, and title pages of books he wrote cite him as "A. Lesson". There were two other surgeons (first class) on the Astrolabe: Jean Rene Constant Quoy (1790-1869) and Joseph Paul Gaimard (1793-1858). They were trained zoologists, who, with d'Urville, wrote sections of the zoology of the voyage and prepared numerous fine drawings and watercolours, which were published in the atlases.

The Astrolabe spent sixty-seven days (January to March 1827) in New Zealand waters. It made landfall near Cape Farewell and sailed into Tasman Bay and anchored on the west side, under shelter from Adele Island, named after d'Urville's wife. A large number of plants were collected in this region and several new species were subsequently named. Dumont d'Urville discovered French Pass, which separated D'Urville Island from the South Island mainland and Tasman Bay from the Marlborough Sounds. The Astrolabe struck a reef twice while attempting to go through French Pass, and for a time lay on her beam ends with the likelihood that she would be wrecked. The officers, relieved to escape, asked their captain to permit the island bordering the pass to be named D'Urville Island in his honour. He agreed, with the proviso that it revert to its Maori name when this was known. A detailed coastal survey was made around Cook Strait, and the Astrolabe then explored the east coast of the North Island. At Bream Head, north of Whangarei, d'Urville found a species of five finger that is restricted to coastal forest from Three Kings Islands to Poverty Bay. This was named Pseudopanax lessonii, after Adolph Lesson. D'Urville treated the Maoris he met with kindness, welcomed the chiefs on board and gained valuable information from them.

The Astrolabe then explored Tonga, Fiji, New Guinea and part of Indonesia, and returned to Australia via the southeast coast and went to Hobart. The voyage home was via Fiji, Vanikoro, Guam, Indonesia and the Cape of Good Hope. The Astrolabe reached Marseilles in March 1829. In d'Urville's words, the voyage had resulted in a "prodigous mass of discoveries, material and records that we brought back to enrich every field of human knowledge" and was one in which "A thousand times I risked the lives of my fellowmen to carry out the purpose of my instructions and I can affirm that throughout two whole years we ran more real dangers every day than would be met with in the whole course of the longest ordinary voyage" (translation by Olive Wright). There was, as with Duperrey's voyage, a royal command to publish the results of the expedition.

Dumont d'Urville devoted many years of hard work as editor and major author to the account of the voyage of the Astrolabe (1826-9), and it was published between 1830 and 1834 in fifteen parts in thirteen volumes, plus three atlases, normally bound as five volumes.

In contrast to Duperrey's Voyage autour du monde . . . Coquille, a large page 52 part of Voyage . . . de l'Astrolabe was devoted to New Zealand. The work has been described as a "magnificent record", and d'Urville, who wrote the entire narrative of the voyage, a "man of letters, a master of the French tongue". The botanical section was published in two volumes (1832, 1834) with the title Voyage de Decouvertes de l'Astrolabe execute par ordre du Rot, pendant les annees 1826-1827-1828-1829, sous le commandement de M. J. Dumont d'Urville. Botanique.

The first volume was by A. Lesson and A. Richard. Achille Richard (1794-1852) was not on the voyage, but was one of the leading botanists of his time and a member of the staff of the National Paris Museum of Natural History until 1831, when he became professor of botany at the Paris Faculté de Médicin. Richard was author and co-author of a large number of floras of various countries, and wrote taxonomic revisions of many plant groups. This first volume was devoted entirely to the flora of New Zealand and consisted of a 376-page Essai d'une Flore de la Nouvelle-Zélande. It described 211 species of seed plants (conifers and flowering plants) and 169 species of lower plants (twenty-nine seaweeds, twenty-seven lichens, twenty-eight liverworts, twenty-eight mosses and fifty-seven ferns and fern allies), many for the first time. Richard included not only specimens collected on the two expeditions by Duperrey and d'Urville, but also most of those obtained by the Forsters on Cook's second voyage, based on collections in the Paris Museum. Some plants collected on the voyage of the Astrolabe, which were described in print for the first time, had been collected by Banks and Solander on Cook's first voyage, but, of course, their studies had not been published.

The second botanical volume of 167 pages included a seven-page section devoted to additions and corrections to the algal flora of New Zealand, and a nine-page explanation of figures in the Atlas that illustrated New Zealand plants.

The botanical and zoological sections of the Atlas of plates were published in 1833 or 1834 (the title page states 1833, but a preface by Gaimard and Quoy is dated 1834). There are forty-one pages of engravings (numbered one to thirty-nine with numbers seven and thirty-four being duplicated for different plates) devoted to New Zealand plants (eight seaweeds, two lichens, seven ferns, one conifer and twenty-three flowering plants). Some copies of the botanical section of the Atlas have hand-coloured plates (Plate 9), but the number of these coloured plates varies from copy to copy. The artists of the botanical section were E. Defile and Vauthier, and the original paintings are in the National Paris Museum of Natural History. A number of highly skilled engravers prepared the plates and, as the "Mile" or "Mme" preceding several surnames shows, some were women. Thomas Cheeseman noted that Essai d'une Flore de la Nouvelle-Zélande "is the first publication dealing with the flora of New Zealand as a whole, and possesses considerable merit, so much so that it is to be regretted that so little use has been made of it by New Zealand botanists".

The third voyage

In 1835, when d'Urville had completed his account of the voyage, he was posted to dockyard duties in Toulon, where it seemed his career might end in obscurity. Undaunted by the rather hostile attitude of some naval authorities, Dumont d'Urville pressed for command of his ship and drew up a project for further research and exploration in southern regions. It was a propitious time for such a suggestion. King Louis-Phillipe, who succeeded Charles X when the latter abdicated, was well aware that his reign so far lacked the sort of adventurous exploits that were dear to the hearts of his subjects. He therefore accepted the proposals of d'Urville, which the naval authorities had passed on to him, but added a modification to the plans. Dumont d'Urville was ordered to take the French flag as far south as possible in the Weddell Sea, within the Antarctic Circle. Each of the crew was promised 100 francs if the latitude of 75° S was reached, and ten francs for every degree of latitude beyond that. The British and Americans too were interested in .exploring southern polar regions. Ross's expedition set out in 1839,  and the second United States Expedition, authorised by Act of Congress in 1836 and led by Wilkes, set out in 1838.

Two corvettes took part in the expedition: the Astrolabe under d'Urville, and the Zélée captained by d'Urville's second-in-command on the previous voyage, Charles Jacquinot. Botanical collecting was assigned to Jacques Bernard Hombron (1800-52), senior surgeon of the Astrolabe, and Honore Jacquinot (b. 1814), junior surgeon on the Zélée and younger brother of the captain. Two other surgeons on the Zélée also served as naturalists: Elie Jean Francoise Le Guillou and Jules Grange. D'Urville, who "was planning to botanise only as a simple amateur", did contribute to collections made on the voyage. Dumont d'Urville was forty-seven when the Astrolabe and Zélée sailed from Toulon on 7 September 1837, returning there on 7 November 1840. The vessels reached polar regions in February 1838, and d'Urville named parts of the Antarctic coast on the west side of the Weddell Sea (for example, Joinville Land, after one of Louis-Phillipe's sons).

In March they withdrew to the north after fruitless attempts to penetrate the pack ice and headed for Chile. Then the expedition spent twenty-one months exploring the islands of the Pacific and reached Hobart in December 1839. There, spurred on by news of the polar expeditions of Ross and Wilkes and lured by the quest for the South Magnetic Pole, d'Urville decided to ignore his written orders and head south again. A number of the crew of both ships had become ill during the voyage to Hobart and were hospitalised there, so d'Urville and Jacquinot hired some English seamen. The Astrolabe and Zélée headed south on New Year's Day

1840,  and on 21 January they set foot on islands off the Antarctic coast, naming Adelie Land after d'Urville's wife and Cote Clarie after Jacquinot's. When they encountered one of the ships of Wilkes' expedition, the rival vessels apparently ignored each other. The cruise in Antarctic waters was brief and on 17 February the Astrolabe and Zélée returned to Hobart. Eight page 54 days later they set off for New Zealand via the Auckland Islands and Stewart Island, sailing up the east coast of both islands. When they reached Akaroa, it was learned that Captain Hobson had arrived in the Bay of Islands two months previously and had been appointed governor of New Zealand. D'Urville's diary reveals his disappointment that the British had claimed all of New Zealand, especially as he knew that sixty French colonists were on their way to Akaroa on Le Comte de Paris. When the Astrolabe and Zélée reached the Bay of Islands, d'Urville met Hobson and from there sailed for France.

The crews of the Astrolabe and Zélée received a warm welcome on their return to France, and d'Urville was promoted to rear-admiral and the crew received financial rewards from Louis-Phillipe for "their heroic exploits". It had not been an easy voyage for, of the combined crew of 165 officers and men, twenty-two had died and thirteen deserted. Another of d'Urville's sons died in France during his absence. (A daughter had died of cholera when the family were together in Toulon in 1835. Jules and Adele Dumont d'Urville apparently had four children of whom three were boys.)

Again by royal command, d'Urville began to prepare an account of the voyage for publication. This Voyage an Pôle Sud et dans I'Océanie sur les corvettes l'Astrolabe et la Zelee, exécuté par ordre du Roi pendant les années 1837-1838-1839-1840, sous le commandement de M.J. Dumont d'Urville was published in twenty-three parts (in twenty-two volumes), with an Atlas of seven parts (bound into five volumes), between 1841 and 1854. Sadly, Dumont d'Urville did not live to see its completion. He, his wife and their surviving son were burned to death in a horrifying train accident on the Paris-Versailles line. D'Urville had seen the first two volumes of the narrative of the voyage through the press; it was completed by his friend Vincendon-Dumoulin, marine engineer on the Astrolabe, who had access to his papers.

The botanical section, Voyage au Pôle Sud. . . Botanique, under the general supervision of Hombron and Jacquinot, appeared in two volumes in 1845 and 1853, together with an atlas of sixty-five plates (twenty in colour) in 1852. The first volume (1845) dealt with lower, non-vascular plants and was written by Jean Pierre Francois Camille Montagne (1784-1866), who had been a military physician but was then a private scientist in Paris. Montagne was a prolific author of works on lower plants. When Hombron died in 1852, the text describing the vascular plants (ferns, conifers and flowering plants) collected during the voyage had not been written. This task was taken on by Decaisne of the Paris Museum, who had drawn plants for the Atlas of the Coquille voyage. This second volume is only some ninety-six pages in length. In contrast to the first volume, only those plants illustrated in the Atlas, which had already been published, were described in the text.

Decaisne made a number of corrections to vascular plant names given in the Atlas, but it remains a mystery whether vascular plants other than those illustrated in the Atlas had been collected. Certainly some of specimens page 55 illustrated had been lost by the time Decaisne began his work, and he had to base some descriptions on those in Joseph Hooker's Flora Antarctica. As many botanists have commented, it is surprising that only sixteen species of ferns and eighty-four flowering plants were collected on the expedition — if, in truth, Decaisne's list represented the total number of higher plants collected by several naturalists on such a long voyage. Fifteen of these eighty-four plants were collected from the Auckland Islands (most of these had already been described in Hooker's Flora Antarctica). The Atlas . . . Botanique (1852) comprises sixty-five plates, twenty of which illustrate non-vascular plants. These are in colour. The other forty-five plates are in black and white, and are devoted to ferns and seed plants. In addition to the plants from the Auckland Islands, most plates illustrate plants collected near the Strait of Magellan, South America, but a few New Zealand ones are included, for example, the hen and chicken fern (Asplenium bul-biferum) and a species of bidi-bidi {Acaena sanguisorbe, now known as Acaena anserinifolia). These plates were drawn by a number of artists, none of whom were on the voyage. The chief contributor was Alfred Riocreux. The plates were engraved by more than a dozen highly skilled engravers.

Dumont d'Urville is commemorated in botany by a genus of brown seaweeds, Durvillea, which includes the giant bull kelp, Durvillea antarctic a. This is common on exposed coasts around New Zealand up to the low-tide mark. It was first collected off Cape Horn, and the genus was named by Bory de Saint-Vincent in 1826. He is also remembered in the species names of several New Zealand flowering plants — Dracophyllum urvilleanum, one of our "grass trees" (Plate 47 illustrates a different species of Dracophyllum); Hebe urvilleana and a species of buttercup, Ranunculus urvilleanus. Jules Dumont d'Urville was unusual among the admirals of his time in that he was a knowledgeable naturalist as well as an outstanding seaman and navigator. One wonders, had he lived to direct the completion of Voyage au Pôle Sud, whether the section on botany might not have been more extensive.

Plate 11 Parsonsia capsularis var. rosea

This twining woody liane (climber), a close relative of the kaihua {Parsonsia hetero-phylla), is a member of the family Apocynaceae, which includes the periwinkles (Vinca) and oleanders (Nerium). The rapidly growing shoots encircle the stems of the supporting forest trees and soon attain full sunlight for the drooping leafy branches. The fragrant clusters of flowers are normally white, but in this variety (originally described by Raoul as a separate species, Parsonsia rosea) the petals are rose to dark red in colour. This variety was originally collected by Raoul near Akaroa and is restricted to the South Island, where it is common on the Port Hills and Banks Peninsula.

Each flower (lower right) has five small, green sepals, five petals, united into a tube for most of their length, and a central, protruding cone of stamens. They are attached basally to the inside of the petal tube and conceal the female part of the flower. This consists of two coherent carpels in the centre of the flower. They develop into pod-like elongated fruits, which become separated from each other and split lengthwise to release numerous seeds, given buoyancy by a tuft of hairs. This illustration from Choix de Plantes by Alfred Riocreux was engraved by Mademoiselle E. Taillant.

page break

Plate 11 Parsonsia capsularis var. rosea (Raoul) Ckn. Alfred Riocreux (in Raoul's Choix de Plantes)

Plate 12 Helichrysum aggregatum (Helichrysum glomeratum)

In his original description, Raoul named this plant Swammerdamia (misspelt as Swammerdammia on the illustration) glomerata. Its name was changed to Helichrysum glomeratum by Bentham and Hooker in 1873, and in 1970 it was changed by Yeo to Helichrysum aggregatum. It too was first discovered at Akaroa by Raoul, but it is widely distributed in coastal and lowland shrubland and forest margins throughout the North and South Islands. There are nine endemic species of Helichrysum in New Zealand. About 350 other species of this member of the daisy family (Compositae) occur in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. Helichrysum aggregatum is a shrub up to three metres high with slender branchlets.

The main illustration is approximately natural size. Figure 1 shows an inflorescence of florets; figure 2, an outer female floret (flower) with its ring of pappus hairs, tubular petals, free at their tips only, and central style, with its terminal, two-part stigma; figure 3, part of a pappus hair; figure 4, a more central disc floret with stamens bearing terminal pollen sacs, bent to the right; figure 5, part of a stamen showing the pollen sacs; figure 6, part of the style and terminal two-part stigma of the female part of a floret. The style is attached at its base to the ovary (not visible in the illustrations), which contains a single ovule (potential seed). This illustration is by Alfred Riocreux from Choix de Plantes and was engraved by Mlle Taillant. The delicate engravings of the French illustrators (PLATES 9 to 12) are quite a contrast to the more robust engravings of many British works (for example, PLATES 4 to 7).

page break

Plate 12 Helichrysum aggregatum P. F. Yeo. Alfred Riocreux (in Raoul's Choix de Plantes)

page 57

Plate 13 Sophora tetraptera (kowhai)

This was the first New Zealand plant to be illustrated in Curtis's Botanical Magazine. It appeared as illustration no. 167 in volume 5, 1791, painted by Sydenham Edwards, with explanatory text by William Curtis. The kowhai was collected at Poverty Bay by Banks and Solander on Cook's first voyage in 1769. The seeds they gathered survived the return voyage and, as Solander predicted, the plants that were raised became popular in Britain and were widely cultivated from cuttings and seeds. The specimen illustrated was obtained from the Apothecaries' Garden, Chelsea, where it had been planted about 1774.

There are approximately thirty species of Sophora, in temperate and subtropical regions of both hemispheres. Two of the three New Zealand species of kowhai are endemic {Sophora tetraptera and S. prostrata), the other, S. microphylla, occurs also in Chile and on Gough Island in the South Atlantic. Experiments have shown that the seeds, which float on the sea, will germinate after even three years' immersion. Sophora tetraptera, the largest-leaved kowhai, is restricted in natural vegetation to the east of the North Island, from East Cape to Hawke's Bay and Taihape.

page break

Plate 13 Sophora tetraptera J. Mill, (kowhai) Sydenham Edwards (in Curtis's Botanical Magazine, 1791)

Plate 14 Pittosporum cornifolium (tawhirikaro)

This illustration, no. 3161 in volume 59, 1832, was by William Hooker himself. The Plate was engraved by Joseph Swan, a Glasgow printer and engraver. The pittosporums include some of our most widely grown native plants. Some of them are popular overseas, especially in parts of California. There are twenty-six species of Pittosporum (family Pittosporaceae) in New Zealand's flora. Some are widespread, others are rare, and all are restricted to the New Zealand region. About 135 species grow in mainly tropical and subtropical regions of the Southern Hemisphere.

Tawhirikaro, or the perching kohuhu, is an open-branched shrub up to two metres tall, which is often perched on large forest trees such as northern rata (Metrosideros robusta) and rimu (Dacrydium cupressinum). It also grows on rocks. In contrast to most other pittosporums, in which the leaves are arranged alternately on the branch-lets, tawhirikaro has leaves arranged mostly in whorls of three to five. The leaves are shiny dark green above and paler below, with very short stalks. Flowers have light red to yellowish petals. There are usually separate male and female flowers, but sometimes bisexual flowers are present too. Each flower is one and a half centimetres in diameter and consists of a ring of five small green sepals with finely tapering tips, five petals, five stamens which are present but sterile on female flowers and a central ovary, which has a reduced sterile form in male flowers. Mature fruits are woody capsules about one and a half centimetres in diameter. While still on the plants, the greenish capsules split open to reveal a red-lined interior with shiny, black seeds embedded in a sticky yellow fluid. Tawhirikaro grows in lowland to lower montane forest throughout the North Island, but occurs only in the north of the South Island from the Marlborough Sounds to Whanganui Inlet. The specimen illustrated was sent to William Hooker from Kew, where it had been introduced by Allan Cunningham.

page break

Plate 14 Pittosporum cornifolium A. Cunn. William Hooker (in Curtis's Botanical Magazine, 1832)