Three of our botanists recently spent a week on Norfolk Island collecting ferns with colleagues from the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. Our fern findings will be detailed in a future blog post but here we discuss interesting flowering plants that we saw – some of which were very familiar to us as New Zealanders but others were completely new!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
Over the holidays I was fortunate to spend a few days botanising the Marino Mountains, including Mount Owen, in north-west Nelson’s Kahurangi National Park. Kahurangi National Park is one of the most botanically interesting regions in New Zealand. Nearly half of New Zealand’s native plant species and 80% of ourRead more
While exploring the subalpine flora around the Otira Valley during the field trip at the end of the Australian Systematic Botany Society 2010 Conference I recently attended, I came across some plants that I have studied in the past, as well as others that I’m about to begin researching. AfterRead more
