For a few days in mid-January, Curator Botany Heidi Meudt was part of a team that conducted a survey of Myosotis umbrosa, a plant with the same threat status as the kākāpō: Threatened – Nationally Critical. The team spent three days in the Rock and Pillar Range in Otago to get a better understanding of where it is found and how big the population is. Read on to discover how they did this work and what they found.
What is Myosotis umbrosa?
Myosotis umbrosa is an endemic forget-me-not, known only from the Rock and Pillar Range and nearby Lammerlaw Range, Otago, in the South Island of Aotearoa. Its conservation status is Threatened – Nationally Critical, which is a listing for species that have less than 250 total known individuals or that have more individuals but are in serious decline.
M. umbrosa was described fairly recently (2018) by me, Te Papa Curator Botany Heidi Meudt, and my colleagues, based on a study of the morphological characteristics of the handful of dried, pressed specimens at Te Papa and other New Zealand herbaria. The plant is so newly described and so elusive that there were no observations of it on iNaturalist, and no field images there or on Wikimedia Commons. In fact, I had never even seen live plants of Myosotis umbrosa in the field when we described it!
M. umbrosa is a small, low-growing rosette plant with multiple small, white flowers about 4 mm across, each associated with a small leaf-like bract. It has some hooked hairs on the calyx, and some backwards-facing (retrorse) hairs on the calyx and underside of the rosette leaf, which can help distinguish it from other similar forget-me-nots.
The start of the survey
So, to get a better idea of exactly how many plants of this threatened species exist and better understand and document it, Department of Conservation (DOC) Technical Advisor Richard Ewans planned a multi-day survey for January 2026. I was invited to join the rest of the Myosotis umbrosa survey team, which also included four current DOC staff (Richard Ewans, Kelli Gerritsen, Connor Durkin, and Theresa Moore) and two ex-DOC botanists (John Barkla and Brian Rance).
I was excited and nervous – this was my first field trip in three years. Would we find Myosotis umbrosa? Could we easily identify it and distinguish it from other, closely-related species in the area? Would we be able to estimate its current population size and describe its microhabitat?
On the afternoon of Monday 14 January, we finally got a “weather window” to do the survey, and the team drove up to Big Hut in the Rock and Pillar Range, northwest of Middlemarch, Otago, in DOC four-wheel-drive vehicles. The Rock and Pillar Range reaches 1450 m above sea level and is dotted with hundreds of rocky pillars or “tors” along its summit ridge. These tors were our target habitat for Myosotis umbrosa.
After some settling in at Big Hut and a safety briefing, we got straight into our search for forget-me-nots. It didn’t take us too long to find a few individuals of Myosotis umbrosa, and another similar species, M. antarctica subsp. antarctica, in and around the tors. We spent time with hand lenses and rulers to look at their tiny calyces, hairs, flowers and leaf characteristics. The survey was off to a great start – everyone on the team picked up the important characteristics of Myosotis umbrosa, and how to tell it apart from M. antarctica subsp. antarctica.
Looking for tiny plants among giant rocks
Full of excitement, confidence and energy, we headed off early on both Tuesday and Wednesday mornings for two big days of surveying the summit ridge for Myosotis umbrosa. Because we had seven people on the team, we could split up into multiple smaller teams and work more efficiently over the large landscape. We had to check each tor we encountered, including all around the base of the rock and inside any crevices and overhangs. When we found a tor that had M. umbrosa, we recorded the habitat, aspect, associated species, exact location (GPS), and number of flowering and non-flowering individuals present.
All of our findings will be tallied up and summarised in a report that will help DOC to look after this threatened species. Briefly, we ended up finding over 250 plants of M. umbrosa across 25 sites – including flowering individuals and seedlings – near multiple tors over an area of several square kilometers. This is a great result, up from just a few recorded sites and individual plants known before the survey. Myosotis umbrosa lives up to its name – umbrosa means “shady” – in that it is always associated with the rock tors, often hiding near the base or underneath overhangs in protected sites.
Another great outcome of the survey is that there are now several iNaturalist observations of the species, images in Wikimedia Commons and more information and photos on the species’ Wikipedia page!
You can see more about this field trip on the Te Papa website. You can also see the iNaturalist observations from this trip of John, Heidi and Brian.
By the time the next storm was coming through on Wednesday afternoon, we had covered a lot of ground and started our descent back towards Dunedin. Although it was a whirlwind 48 hours in the field, it was a highly fruitful collaboration between young and upcoming botanists at DOC and experienced retired ex-DOC botanists – all with extensive field experience – and me, providing the taxonomic expertise.
The Myosotis umbrosa survey is an excellent example of yet another rewarding DOC and Te Papa collaboration, which was 100% successful in finding and surveying this threatened forget-me-not. DOC plans to continue looking for Myosotis umbrosa across its known distribution, and do similar work for a handful of other Threatened Otago alpine forget-me-nots. For me personally, it was an absolutely joyous return to the field, where I was able to spend time botanising in the high country with other botanists – both old friends and new. I look forward to the next survey!
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Richard Ewans and DOC for organising the survey and inviting me along, and to all my wonderful colleagues on the survey team: John Barkla, Brian Rance, Theresa Moore, Kelli Gerritsen, and Connor Durkin.
Further reading
Explore more research, articles, and collections of Forget-me-nots (Myosotis)
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