Re: New Zealand Flora
- To: m*@ucdavis.edu
- Subject: Re: New Zealand Flora
- From: J* A* <j*@nemo.mech.eng.usyd.edu.au>
- Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 11:09:33 +1000 (EST)
At 15:25 10/03/99 -0800, Deborah wrote:
>On March 4, '99 Moira wrote:
>
>"There are two characteristics of the NZ flora which tend to make
>all-native gardens distinctive, one is the paucity of herbaceous plants,
>including bulbs, and the preponderence among them of white flowers, and
>the other is that virtually all trees and shrubs are evergreen."
>
>Moira (and others),
>
>I found this an interesting observaton and wonder if anyone knows (or has an
>educated guess) why these characteristics exist in the NZ flora.
Well, not really an *educated* guess, but I can speculate:
The daisy family got to NZ first and took over the niches filled by bulbs
and other herbaceous plants elsewhere. Among New Zealand "daisies" are the
Vegetable Sheep and the Mt Cook Lily -- very unlike the traditional daisy.
White flowers -- probably related to the kinds of insects available for
pollination (mostly flies?)
Non-deciduous -- this seems to be a characteristic of the southern
hemisphere as a whole, not just NZ. (I refer only to leaf fall in winter --
there are of course many plants in monsoon forests in Aus and elsewhere that
drop their leaves in the dry season.) The main cold-climate genus in the
south since Gondwana times is Nothofagous, the Antarctic beech (there were
big beech forests in Antarctica once), which seems basically non-deciduous,
but seems to have the capacity to become deciduous. (There is one deciduous
beech in Tassie, just a few in S America, none in NZ, mainland Aussie, or
Melanesia) Maybe the lack of deciduousness in the south temperate zone at
present isn't so much due to the plant goups that happen to be here, but
more to the current lack of cold continental climates, compared with Eurasia
and N America. That is, winters are warmer, summers cooler, since the 30
and 40 latitudes are mostly filled with water.
John.
