Nine years ago (15 March 2016), I posted this here:
“I haven't blogged here for a couple of years. I've been busy doing other things, mostly with a camera, and I'll have more to say about that in good time.”
Since then only a couple of minor posts have appeared, but yes, I have been busy. I’ve been working towards a book about New Zealand flowers. Today I sent the corrected proofs of He Puāwai – a natural history of New Zealand flowers back to the publisher, Auckland University Press. We’re expecting publication to be in October or thereabouts and I’ll have more to say here and elsewhere as that draws closer.
If you're still a follower and get to see this, I'd love to hear from you in the comments.
Pukatea (Laurelia novae-zelandiae, Lauraceae) and hutu (Ascarina lucida, Chloranthaceae) are two unrelated New Zealand trees that are easy to confuse if they’re not in flower or fruit.
Pukatea can be very large trees, usually with distinctive plank buttresses at the base of the trunk. Hutu are small trees or shrubs. But seedlings and small plants are very hard to tell apart at a glance and I think probably everyone has misidentified them at least once.
Their flowers are very different.
Pukatea flowers are insect-pollinated and by far the larger of the two. They can be bisexual or unisexual and we don’t know for sure what the sexual system is in wild populations.
Hutu flowers are wind-pollinated and tiny. What’s more, they’re always unisexual, with both male and female flowers on every tree (so all the trees are hermaphrodites). Their flower biology is much more complicated and interesting than that, and we’ve just published a paper about it.
But how to distinguish hutu and pukatea when they’re not in flower?
These labelled pictures might help, taken from plants in my garden. These are close-up photos, so you won't see these features easily without at least a magnifying lens.
First, stems and nodes. Both have opposite leaves, but hutu has fine whiskery stipules and pukatea doesn't. And pukatea is a bit hairy, while hutu isn't:
Leaf stalks have a distinctive groove in hutu that also carries on up the middle of the leaf (upper surface):
And leaf teeth (upper surface above, lower surface below). Hutu leaf teeth are a characteristic feature of its family Chloranthaceae, but pukatea teeth are very similar in size and shape. Hutu teeth have a thickened central portion especially on the upper surface. The space between the teeth is also different, quite rounded in pukatea, and a sharper angle in hutu.
I'm not sure how much these features vary in the the wild, but they ought to be helpful in telling these two problematic look-alikes apart.
