Spring cleaning at Te Papa this year means getting out our longest feather duster, as we freshen up information about Aotearoa’s native forget-me-nots (Myosotis) on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.Read more
Museums are magical places where time travel happens almost on a daily basis and getting to know what our ancestors and their acquaintances were up to in the 1800s is not so far a reach. Botany Curator Carlos Lehnebach describes how the discovery of a box full of seed packets stored at Te Papa brought a botanist, a nurseryman and his great-great-granddaughter together more than a century later.Read more
Bringing the swamp helmet orchid back from the brink of extinction is a mission that requires a multidisciplinary team of scientists, good eyesight and a lot of patience. There are only a few hundred plants of this species in the world; all of them are here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Curator Dr Carlos Lehnebach talks about his latest research to save this species.Read more
In January 2022, our Botany Curator Heidi Meudt went on a chock-a-block seven-day field trip to Southland with Department of Conservation botanist Brian Rance and several others. The aim of this trip was to collect several species of forget-me-nots growing in the ultramafic Livingstone Mountains and nearby hills. Heidi talks about what they were looking for and the environment the forget-me-nots were growing in. Read more
Te Papa strives to improve access to the collections for which it cares – online accessibility is part of this. Botany Curator Leon Perrie writes about the Botany Team’s mission this year to each make one thousand specimen images available online.Read more
Botany Curator Heidi Meudt and colleagues have published a paper on what is special about the diversification of plants on islands, based on an investigation of the five best-studied island archipelagos, including New Zealand. Read on to find out more about their findings on the role of whole genome duplication – also known as polyploidy – in these island floras.Read more
Botany Curator Heidi Meudt and colleagues have formally described some new forget-me-nots in two published papers. Read on to learn their names, see what they look like, and discover more about them.Read more
Being in lockdown in Wellington didn’t mean an end to fieldwork for some of our staff. Botany Curator Leon Perrie and Researcher Lara Shepherd – who are in the same bubble – used their lockdown walks to collect roadside weeds for our herbarium. But what did they find within only a short walk from home?Read more
Invasive species are one of the biggest threats to indigenous biodiversity. Another new weed for Aotearoa New Zealand has been reported by Botany Curator Leon Perrie and Geneticist Lara Shepherd. They ask whether we are doing enough to identify and control new weeds.Read more
In December 2020, Te Papa botanists Heidi Meudt and Antony Kusabs were in the field with three North Island iwi: Tamakaimoana, Ngāti Porou, and Te Whānau-ā-Apanui. Worryingly, their search for rare forget-me-nots was unsuccessful. But their collaborative mahi struck a meaningful chord.Read more
Neither snow nor rain nor wind nor gloom of night stays these botanists. On a field trip to the South Island in January 2021, botanists Heidi Meudt and Antony Kusabs went to some extreme measures to collect forget-me-nots and other plants for our research and collections.Read more
Botany curator Leon Perrie describes how a New Zealand fern’s closest relative has turned up in an unexpected place.Read more
