Living Among Plants and Animals on the South Coast of Wellington

To the above might be added rocks and stars. If I can be categorised at all, my definition is something along the lines of ‘all-round naturalist’, almost an extinct species nowadays. Really, I am simply a writer on a number of topics that interest me, natural history being one, ordinary (human) history another and above all the words that make up language and literature. For a serious account of South Coast ecology it would be better to go to someone more earnestly academic than I am. But the late Ross McQueen often asked me to join his Stage I Botany field trips — until an untimely landslide poured stones and clay all over his favourite botanical slope; this has since, of course, developed its own ecology.

Perhaps I should proceed from the unthinkably large and distant, to the very tiny but still observable things. Twinkle, twinkle little (!) star, who do humans think they are? Well, maybe they’ve added their tuppence worth to the cloud or drizzle that always seems to blot out interesting planetary encounters. Town glare and local streetlights are not, however, enough to dim those distant ‘clouds’, the silvery Magellanic smudges between the Southern Cross and due celestial south. In any case the atmosphere lights up not only with rainbows but also with hailbows, ghostly lunar rainbows, rings around the moon and sun, iridescent clouds and other beautiful phenomena which also remind me to keep a weather eye on the weather itself. I have seen Aurora Australis from here, but the Windy Point streetlight now lights up the air about it, giving it an orange glow, and deepwater trawling boats have also put up too bright a glare along the horizon. But one auroral display transcended even moon-glow, so that for once, moon-watchers and aurora-watchers were both catered for. Having a foot in both camps, I don’t take sides.

My interest in sea life has its practical side. For years I have collected carrageen seaweed, which can be boiled and jellied as can agar. Before too many inroads into the pāua population had restrictive laws passed, I could always get three or four for the pan without having to dive deeply. Proposed construction of a ramp for speedboats seemed inevitable when I found stones, where the concrete was to be poured, studded underneath with baby pāua; at the same time algologists were studying Gigartina (my panna cotta and cough mixture ingredient) before the habitat was ruined. Now several years later, a few pāua infants are establishing themselves under stones near the ramp and carrageen is well and truly re-established. After rain, I find sheets of it on the beach, bleached and ready for use (unbleached, it needs dark brown sugar for those who don’t like their pudding too seaweedy).

There is always an interesting wash near the ramp, of small, even-sized shell fragments, small whole shells (occasionally the tiny gleaming Nucula), brachiopods, coralline seaweeds and crabs’ backs. Now and then there’s a violet snail — but my richest Tyrian purple ones came from Paekakariki beach, smaller than the lighter-coloured ones I find here. Like the floating salps and jellyfish, these are blue-water sailors. Rams’-horn shells, Spirula, seem to come ashore on the same tide, unable to swim up and down the vertical sea miles that are their home. You won’t find the little animals that belong to them on the beach.

When the ramp was built, the City Council, as promised, ‘landscaped’ the surroundings with greywacke stonework walls and indigenous plants. Some, like the tawny-orange sedge pingao were there already; councillors and voluntary friends of the foreshore have added plants that would have been there in the recent or distant past. The milk-bluish Euphorbia was pretty scarce in my day, but spinards, coastal flax and silver tussock were not far to seek. Up the hill from our house, to the east, Craspedia pompoms and yellow daisy-flowered Senecio lagopus could be found; the spider orchid Corybas macrantha grew beside the Spooky Creek waterfall. Goat-hoof erosion caused the rockslide that buried that colony, but the scrambling native fuchsia that still grows there makes a splendid ground cover behind my house.

Less welcome to me is another ‘native’, Parietaria debilis, which smothers everything else, under, over and through, with its cling-wrap leaves and wiry red roots. However, yellow admiral butterflies deposit their eggs there: it’s fodder for their caterpillars. So whose side am I on now? Freshly-planted spinards among which I pick my way for the year-round morning dip remind me of an occasion years ago when botanical groups, far from planting bayonet-leaved spinards, asked me to collect a full-grown monster for a flower show. Spadework, a sack and a bicycle eventually landed the thing in the Town Hall, after which I soaked my wounds in a long hot bath.