Wednesday wildflower: Red carpet, brown carpet

When I use the term wildflower, it's often to avoid the judgmental term "weed".  I like most plants, and if other people have species they don't like, well, that doesn't necessarily stop me enjoying them.  Furthermore, plants we designate as weeds are often biologically very interesting.  To a botanist, the term "weediness" has an ecological meaning that signifies more than a nuisance plant.

Pōhutukawa flowers

One of the interesting things weeds do well is reproduce.  All that any plant or animal needs to do is to reproduce itself at least once, but because an outcrossing sexual plant or animal contributes only one of its two sets of genes to each offspring it must do it twice to break even.  Even then, reproducing a few times doesn't guarantee the survival of all your genetic material, because which copies of genes get into a sperm or egg is random.  But some plants seem to reproduce in overdrive.

Weeds often succeed because they out-reproduce other plants.  Some are long-lived and may spread vegetatively, but others produce huge numbers of seeds.

A few red stamens have accumulated in the gutter beneath these trees, but sometimes, if it's not windy, a thick red carpet can build up.

Today's wildflower is a weed in the biological sense, but to New Zealanders it's a much-loved native flowering tree, the pōhutukawa, Metrosideros excelsa.  Pōhutukawa puts a lot of effort into reproduction, and that's probably why it's an unwanted weed in some other parts of the world where it has been introduced as an ornamental, like South Africa and Hawai'i.  Some people also consider it a weed in parts of New Zealand that are outside of its native range, such as Wellington, because it's invasive and aggressive there too.

A cluster of pōhutukawa flowers; each individual flower has about 25 red stamens (with yellow anthers) and one red style.

Pōhutukawa reproduction seems wasteful.  The trees flower profusely around Christmas time in New Zealand and in the later part of each flower's life the bright red stamens fall to the ground where they can form a thick red carpet.  This isn't over-production particularly; it's just that the red stamens are so visible and there are so many flowers producing them.  They can be dispensed with once their pollen has been dispersed.  They're visible for a good reason: pōhutukawa is primarily pollinated by birds (tūī, bellbirds, but also silvereyes and starlings) and the red colour attracts them because birds see well in the red wavelengths.

A bit later in the summer, many of the old flowers themselves fall.  I guess these are flowers that aren't setting seed; they no longer have a function and the plant can discard them.  I don't know whether these are functionally male flowers or simply flowers that didn't get pollinated, but these form a pale grey-green carpet for a time.

Pōhutukawa seeds in the gutter, Kelburn, Wellington

The third big dump of reproductive material is happening about now in Wellington, and that's the dispersal of seeds in their millions.  Most of these are never going to germinate.  They pile up in gutters, on footpaths, and at the bases of walls.  I'd like to do a rough calculation of the weight of stamens, aborted flowers, and seeds produced by a large pōhutukawa tree in a season; I think we'd all be surprised.  Multiply that, whatever it is, by the number of trees in Wellington and that's a lot of biomass falling to the ground each year.

Pōhutukawa seeds.

This prodigious reproductive effort is one of the attributes that makes pōhutukawa such a successful plant, and it's a trait normally associated with weediness.  No wonder then that our Christmas tree has become a pest in places.