KEY POINTS:
A conservationist wants New Zealanders to embrace cabbage trees.
Ewan McGregor, a Hawkes Bay regional councillor who has a farming background and a passion for planting trees, says New Zealanders take the cabbage tree for granted but the long-term future of these iconic specimens is uncertain.
Five years
ago he realised that many of the large specimens scattered over the rural landscape were in terminal decline.
Many were survivors from native bush-clearing more than 150 years ago and were simply dying of old age.
"I just felt we had a duty to future generations to revive them," he says.
Inspired by the success of Project Crimson 15 years ago, a campaign to preserve and revive pohutukawa and rata in New Zealand, Mr McGregor now wants the cabbage tree - ti kouka - saved from the ravages of grazing livestock, disease and natural attrition.
He has established the fledgling Project Ti Kouka, in a bid to save and regenerate the cabbage tree so that it once again becomes a flourishing feature of the land.
Its first backer is an Australian-based firm called Computershare, which sponsors environmental projects through a programme known as eTree, administered by Mr McGregor's friend Rob Youl of Landcare Australia.
The patron of Project Ti Kouka is Fiona Lady Elworthy of Timaru, whose property Craigmore has cabbage trees in covenant.
An on-farm research project in Canterbury is using cabbage tree seed to determine the best varieties for propagation.
Mr McGregor has a small trial plot on a research farm south of Hastings where he has 500 cabbage tree plants in the ground.
A short distance away on the property he has planted cabbage tree "poles", similar to the common method for propagating poplars and willows in situ - in the paddock among grazing stock. Stock are one of the worst enemies of the cabbage tree, ring-barking the trunk with their rubbing and flattening the ground around its base, where a dying plant would normally send up fresh shoots.
Any shoots which manage to surface are quickly grazed. Mr McGregor's solution is to protect the cabbage tree poles with a cylinder of deer-netting hotwired to an electric fence. He wants to see healthy clusters of cabbage trees on grazing land throughout New Zealand, instead of just a lonely specimen struggling to survive in a paddock.
He plans to have other cabbage tree nurseries outside Hawkes Bay as a result of his trial. The New Zealand cabbage tree (cordyline australis) was named by the crew of Captain Cook after the saw Maori break open the spike of unopened leaves at its tip to reveal an artichoke or cabbage-like heart which was boiled and eaten. It is one of the largest of all tree lilies.
It survived bush-clearing fires because of its ability to renew its trunks rapidly from buds on rhizomes beneath the soil and even apparently dead specimens will suddenly send up a new shoot in a determined bid to survive.
Maori used cabbage trees to mark trails and for food. Early settlers used their fronds to make shelters; colonial dwellers frequently had specimens in their gardens.
In the 1980s, reports of cabbage trees suddenly dying in northern parts of New Zealand triggered a number of investigations into the cause.
Scientists concluded that parasitic bacteria, transmitted by sap-sucking insects, were probably to blame. The Australian passionvine hopper is a suspect. Few cases of the disease, called sudden decline, are reported any more.
Mr McGregor is not an advocate for cabbage trees in urban areas. While they look nice, their fibrous dead leaves wreak havoc with lawnmowers.
But he would dearly like to see them growing in protected clumps on farmland, providing shade, shelter and beauty to a sometimes bare landscape. "If every farmer planted one cabbage tree each year over 40 years, we'd have a great legacy for future Kiwis," he says.
- NZPA