Mere Tamanui. Photo: Veronika Meduna
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Ngutukākā, or kakabeak, is a popular garden plant in Aotearoa.
But in the wild, it is now rarer than kākāpō, with only about 100 individual plants surviving on steep, inaccessible cliffs on the East Coast.
The Tairāwhiti Ngutukākā Trust is on a mission to bring the taonga back.
After a few years of planting hundreds of young plants grown from wild seed, the community celebrated the first Ngutukākā Festival this spring.
People joined the Ngutukākā Festival from all parts of Aotearoa and gathered at Hinetamatea Marae in Anaura Bay to hear the story of how the plants were taken from there some 250 years ago when Banks and Solander came ashore from the Endeavour. Photo: Veronika Meduna
Once plentiful, now critically endangered
From Hinetamatea Marae in Anaura Bay, the view stretches across a scalloped coastline hemmed in by steep cliffs at the northern end.
This is where Captain Cook's Endeavour dropped anchor in October 1769 and naturalists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander went ashore to collect plants. They found ngutukākā growing everywhere around people's homes and collected several plants to dry and press for their herbarium.
Back then, ngutukākā thrived along the North Island's east coast, from Te Taitokerau to Tairāwhiti, around Lake Waikaremoana, the Hawke's Bay and on Aotea Great Barrier Island, splashing coastal cliffs with bright red.
It was so bountiful and treasured, Māori brought it as koha when visiting other marae. They traded it and used it to lure birds into snares.
Despite its popularity as a garden plant, ngutukākā is one of New Zealand’s most threatened plants. Photo: Veronika Meduna
But now, the few plants known in the wild struggle to survive mostly near Ruatoria on the East Coast, Lake Waikaremoana, and in Hawke's Bay around the Boundary Stream Mainland Island.
Once ngutukākā seeds arrived in England, botanists propagated plants for formal garden collections and people grew them in home gardens.
In 2012, seeds from London's Kew Gardens were returned to Tairāwhiti and the trust has been growing plants from them ever since, engaging marae and schools to nurture seedlings on their grounds.
At Anaura Bay, the descendants of plants taken from there more than 250 years ago are now thriving outside the wharenui. At Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Mangatuna, north of Tolaga Bay, children treasure the plants growing on their school grounds.
The ngutukākā planted at the entrance of Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Mangatuna were grown from seeds returned from England 250 years after Banks and Solander first collected the plants at Anaura Bay. Photo: Veronika Meduna
Botanist Graeme Atkins (Ngāti Porou) is one of the driving forces behind the trust's work and has helped to grow and plant hundreds of seedlings each winter.
He previously worked for the Department of Conservation (DOC) for almost 30 years, looking after the few remaining wild plants. Now his vision is to create a crimson State Highway 35.
"When I first started at DOC, there were over a couple hundred plants in the wild that we used to look after. That same area now, there's fewer than a hundred. It's a trend we need to reverse," Graeme says.
Graeme Atkins. Photo: Veronika Meduna
Cultural revival
Ngutukākā is named for its clusters of bright red flowers, shaped like a parrot's beak. Its seeds are long-lived and can germinate even after 30 years in the soil, springing back to life when light gaps appear.
This wild seed bank is an advantage for the Tairāwhiti conservation project, but the team is up against a barrage of pests - deer, goats, pigs, hares, livestock and introduced garden snails - that love to eat the tasty plants, particularly their nutritious seed pods.
Two iwi, Ngāti Porou and Te Whānau ā Apanui, are working together to give ngutukākā a helping hand in Tairāwhiti, on either side of the Raukūmara ranges. Both are rediscovering its significance not just in stories about how plentiful it once was, but also in symbols used in carvings and stitching patterns on marae linen.
Trailerload of ngutukākā seedlings. Photo: Veronika Meduna
For Mere Tamanui, one of the Tairāwhiti Ngutukākā trustees, there's a connection between returning ngutukākā to its home and bringing people back to reconnect with their land.
"It's about reconnecting whānau ki te whenua - connecting people to space and place," Mere says.
"On the coast, we have a saying that the loss of people's connections to space and place results in the loss of biodiversity. So it's about how we create meaningful engagements to bring people back."
Listen to the episode to learn more about the cultural significance of ngutukākā, its revival story, and the trust's vision for the species' future in Tairāwhiti.
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