Whether providing shade for a summer picnic, standing sentinel on a crumbling cliff or splashing Christmas crimson along garden edge, street or shoreline, the pohutukawa is one of the trees New ...

Empress Hut, perched on the western flank of Mt Cook, is one of more than 1000 huts peppered throughout the New Zealand back country. But how secure is this heritage in the face of difficult economic ...

One of the rarest ecologies in the world is hiding in plain sight, in the centre of the most central suburb of the largest city in New Zealand. Of more than 5000 hectares of rock forest that once ...

In the late 19th century, news of a strange antipodean bird with beautiful tail feathers, orange wattles, and a long curved beak spread around the British Empire. To Māori, it was a tapu bird—a sacred ...

Gardeners with a keen sense of history can now forge a botanical link with a plant which hasn’t been seen on these shores for millions of years. A species of Ecuadorian coconut has been success­fully ...

New Zealand’s 11 wilderness areas offer adventure, solitude and a glimpse of the world as it was. But what does the future hold for what one tramper termed our “hunting grounds for the imagination”?

What would the beach be without red-billed gulls? We may be about to find out. Two huge colonies have already gone under and the next biggest, in Kaikōura, is failing fast. In December 2023, ...

Feijoas have become a New Zealand emblem. So how did they end up in Aotearoa, and how did we end up adoring them—to the point of obsession, for some—when feijoas have not really caught on anywhere ...

Right now, says the Government, it’s OK to swim in just over 70 per cent of the country’s rivers and lakes. By 2040, it aims to make 90 per cent of rivers and lakes “swimmable” on the back of ...

The delicacy and brilliance of a hummingbird wedded to an industrial-strength beak that would do a woodpecker proud, the chimeric little kingfisher stakes a claim in our hearts. Returning with a snack ...

Moriori gave the Chatham Islands the name Rekohu or “misty skies”, a most appropriate name since cold water from Antarctica meets a warm current from the north to produce a lot of mist in the area.

I can’t fully recall how the affair started, it was so long ago. I was in Pat Bergquist’s invertebrate zoology class, at the University of Auckland, in 1975. She was talking about sponges. Bergquist ...