North Island Flora

We just got back from our three-week trip to the North Island. We've got lots of photos to post, and I'm arranging them by topic and location. One of the things I loved the most about being there was the flowers. It's the dead of winter in the Southern Hemisphere, but Auckland and the area south and east of Auckland where we traveled are subtropical, so it was a treat to see flowers in winter. To put the geography in perspective, if Auckland were in the Northern Hemisphere, its latitude would be between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The first photo was taken on the sand dunes by a beach.

The next three photos show some random flowers we saw in people's gardens.

I saw these next flowers several times. They're on a climbing vine, in this case draped across a fence.

The next two photos show a tree with unusual flowers. Someone told us birds really like the nectar in the flowers. Dave is wearing his rain gear, because for the first two weeks of our trip, the weather was rain-sun-rain-sun, back and forth many times every day. We saw more rainbows in those two weeks than I think I've seen in my whole life put together.

The North Island has lots of Norfolk pines. They were imported from Norfolk Island and seem to thrive in New Zealand. When I first saw them, I couldn't believe that the tree I once had as a house plant could grow so tall.

The North Island is also home to the black fern, which is a tree fern, the largest fern in the world. We saw whole hillsides covered with these ferns, making a really unusual texture. In the second picture, look carefully and you'll see the many tree ferns on the hillside. The third picture shows how big they are.