There are those who refer to the parched, golden ecosystems of our Central Otago drylands as “nothing there”. A desert (so profaning deserts), a land that only if it had water poured upon it, could be of some use to humans, of some economic importance for the small, time being of a person’s life. And to hell with the existence of what is there—the unknown, partly unseen, unheralded plants from the age of dinosaurs, and in their brilliance of adaptation and beauty, useful in the full sense of community. Here, at Butchers Dam, I’m reminded of Brian Turner’s poem Deserts, for instance: “The loveliest places of all/are those that look as if/there’s nothing there/to those still learning to look.”
Wendell Berry, the American writer and environmentalist, in considering the dread and power of a flooded river, wrote, “One must simplify it in order to speak of it,” in some way even “to look at it”. This simplifying of what is there towards what is not there, this ignorance of ignorance, is partly why five of us, aged 58 to 80, and all committee members of the Central Otago Environmental Society (COES), gather at Flat Top Hill dryland reserve, beginning at Butchers Dam, to pay homage to plants. To the smallest of plants, ones that take getting down on knees to peer at, as if into far constellations through a telescope. There we are: president Brian Turner, treasurer Evelyn Skinner, committee members Michael Harlow, Matt Sole and myself (secretary). Matt, with a background in conservation and archaeology, is our tutor for the afternoon.
Our group, COES, is known for its dedication to rivers, our river the Manuherikia in particular, and we have an environmental court hearing in the near future over the neighbouring Lindis for a health-preserving minimum flow for the river. All people, in whichever place they live, ought to care for their own river and stand up for it and be a voice alongside it. But more than rivers are threatened here in Central. Our land is the most threatened ecosystem in New Zealand, its dry hills seen as “a wasteland”, a resource needing irrigation. But what is here? Even I couldn’t name the plants or how they lived. Not even Olearia odorata, with its musical name, its twig-like persistence in the heat, its silvery leaves and small fragrant white flowers. I live here in these golden hills, in this “World of Difference”, as the council touts, anguished at the loss of tussock lands (whose rippling shine I know) to the green rye of dairy fodder, but without knowing what else lives and thrives in its own way here and is threatened, sidelined, simplified as of not much importance at all.
Perhaps it was reading American conservation biologist Gary Paul Nabhan’s comments: “If we have no clear idea of what went before, we are more likely to accept things as we find them, no matter how degraded they may be.” And that made me think of Brian’s account of the Mackenzie country’s lost Ohau River in his autobiography Somebodies and Nobodies. I’d had no idea of the existence of that river, the “clarity and fuming force” of it. I knew only the serene, bright blue canals from my road trips down south to visit grandchildren, and saw in the canals a sluggish, sky-reflecting beauty.
“The Ohau was a boisterous, belligerent river,” writes Turner, “full of big boulders and white, sometimes green-streaked stones; in some sections the bottom was littered with polished lumps of earth’s masonry. Alf said some of the pools looked as if the water ran over the ruins of Roman temples. The river’s surface flexed, bumped, bulged. If ever a river could be said to hiss and roar, have muscles, it was the Ohau. It was a heavyweight boxer, both mesmerising and appalling. I was entranced by its power and also fearful.”
I didn’t know the wild river that had been sacrificed for the canals. I didn’t know what had been lost to us forever. If a writer doesn’t know his or her own world enough to bring it to readers, how then will people know what is there and what has gone? “Recognising loss,” as Nabhan says, “we may even act to prevent future loss.” As foremost a writer, then, I had asked Matt to show us the dryland ecosystem he knows and loves.
We stand in the carpark next to Butchers Dam, and look across to the shrub-textured land of Flat Top Hill, and over to the hills of farmland on the slopes of the Old Man Range. Ploughed, over-sown, fertilised, irrigated—“Before they knew what was there, what they’d taken away,” said Matt. “How do we protect our world of difference? In 12 years it’s gone green before my eyes.” He stands there a moment looking across the valley. “Flat Top Hill is a modified landscape, one of our only lowland areas in conservation. We’ve got the dregs but that’s all we’ve got. There’s no intention by council to identify any other areas of significance above existing DOC conservation areas,” he says. “And then to make sure threatened native species didn’t intrude on so-called development they had to be a half hectare block of contiguous listed threatened plant species. Native plants wouldn’t exist in blocks like that in the wild,” Matt says. “Maybe you’d get it with California thistle, or gorse.”
He went on to say Central Otago is the closest to a desert we’ve got. “The Old Man Range lifts the artic winds and dumps them over the Hawkduns. Along with block mountains to the east and west it keeps this area sheltered in the rain shadows of the mountains.” So here we have Central—the driest area in New Zealand—lying east beyond the mountains of Fiordland—the wettest area in New Zealand.
Our tour begins by walking along the edge of Butchers Dam. It’s a hot, fine day, and, typical of those of us who live in Central, we’ve come with jackets, woolly hats, even thermals. Matt is the most sensibly dressed, in T-shirt and shorts, but Brian and I, from our hot/cold valley that had hail only last Tuesday, can never trust summer means it will stay hot. For now our jackets are tied around our waists. We stop and peer into the opaque depths of the water. The dam has an algal bloom, it’s like looking at pea and ham soup, swirling with a murky haze. And underneath, a history I hadn’t known of either—the dammed Butchers Creek, and along with it part of a community, including the stone Butchers Gully Hotel from the gold mining days. It’s said when the water is low, you can still see the chimney stacks of the hotel glimmering beneath the surface.
The 813 hectares of Flat Top Hill Conservation Area was purchased by DOC in 1992. It was originally seabed, as most of Central was. 20–25 million years ago the sea reached inland as far as Ranfurly, Naseby and Tarras. And when the sea receded, this whole district, from St Bathans to Roxburgh, evolved into a wetland complex, Lake Manuherikia—a series of lakes and swamps, with a subtropical climate complete with eucalyptus trees and crocodiles. A fragment of a crocodile’s jawbone was found protruding from a low cliff near St Bathans in sediments estimated to be 16–19 million years old. And more recently, fossilized teeth and bones from a “giant” prehistoric bat were found in St Bathans. Right here, Matt tells us, on the shores of Butchers Dam, are ancient fossil soils, palaeosols, multi-coloured soils formed during that subtropical era. They were exposed by the gold miners’ sluicing, and are now protected in this reserve.
But it’s the plants I want to know, and as soon as we are off the concrete structure of the dam, Matt bends to show us the most humble of plants, the almost homeless tumbleweed lichen, Chondropsis semiviridis. It looks like something crumbled on the ground and when we bend to pick some up, it has the fragile, bony structure of lichen, and yet it is completely self-sufficient. A life tumbled about on the earth and rocks by the wind. I’m pleased to find it again and again on our walk, something I now know exists, and can name.
“Lichen is an ancient plant,” Matt says. “Algae and fungi living in a symbiotic relationship.” And it’s a good monitor of air clarity. “Cities don’t have lichen, the pollution stuffs them up. After rain the lichens are greener. Now they’re parked up in hibernation.” Chondropsis is usually yellow-green. The shreds in our hands are a dusty yellow-brown. I wouldn’t have known it for a living plant, and place the threads back on the soil.
“Most people, first looking up at this hill, will see thyme, briar, rocks,” Matt says. “But this is a knee-high forest. A very misunderstood region. And if you look, you’ll see the natives are regenerating. The native grass, Elymus solandri, now it’s no longer being grazed, is coming up through the thyme.” And I see it, the graceful, drooping, wheat-laden heads of the grass, that, as Matt said, used to sway and bend on the hills in the breeze, before the land was introduced to the exotic grasses browntop and sweet vernal. But here on these protected hectares, species of Elymus are gaining space, threading their stems through the dried, aromatic thyme and reaching above it.
The thyme is everywhere. The pungent spiky herb covers the land in browning scrawls (it flushes purple in the spring). It’s allelopathic, Matt tells us, producing a toxin that stops other plants growing unless it can be out-competed. And pines are the same, he says. “The monoculture of a pine forest, like walking through a morgue. The past native vegetation out- competed for life-sustaining light.”
What sticks in my mind later is not the plants themselves but Matt’s reverence and loyalty to them. His protective passion. Passion that leads to knowledge, and knowledge to action. How he led us across a high slope; Michael taking care to balance on the rocks, Evelyn sure with her stick, Brian agile from his mountaineering days, and me in a tangle of jacket and knapsack clambering onto the high ledge beside Matt. He lifted a small chain of fern in his hand for us to see; Asplenium flabellifolium, the necklace fern. One of the 13 fern species inhabiting Flat Top in apparent contradiction to this semi-arid dryland system.
I sit here while I write this with my door open and the long poignant calls of the sheep separated from their lambs in the woolshed early this morning. The ewes up there now on Rough Ridge, bereft in the hard light on the slopes. I know that terrain: the small ponds cupped in the folds on the ridge, the ewes and lambs in the shelter of monolithic tors, and the mothers alone up there now where the rocks hold the heat and the grass crackles underneath after the drought.
I do not wish to know the fate of the male lambs in detail. The female lambs, replacements, were driven back up the road this morning. They’ll be knee deep in purple- flowered lupin. The male lambs left on the red trucks I’ve seen going up and down the valley, the “store lambs”, gone up to Canterbury for further fattening, and then to the works, as they were always destined to, even as they each roamed with their mothers, sheltered by her woolly, panting sides in drought and wind and hail alike, following her blindly along the age-worn trails on the side of the hill towards the drafting gate.
When I think of what we face—climate disruption, extreme events, the ongoing wrench of commercialization into the heart of the wild; the rivers dammed, the insect-haven trees sprayed, the tussock burnt, it’s the thought of people like Matt Sole that brings hope. Here there are a few, passionate in their own spheres, who do what they can—and in instances that means against the status quo—doggedly inquiring of the district council or the regional council or the Government, why is this happening? And what needs to be done instead?
Perhaps this land does look desert-like, but it wasn’t always so. After the time of the swamps, with the climate changing and cooling, there were forests and in the lowland areas, vast reaches of tussocks and native grasses. But by 1911, after a combination of frequent fires and over-grazing, a million hectares of Central Otago land had been left “desert-like”, according to an article in the New Zealand Journal of Ecology (1995)—The Vegetation of Flat Top Hill: An Area of Semi-arid Grassland and Shrubland in Central Otago, New Zealand, by Susan Walker, Alan F. Mark and J. Bastow Wilson. They quote Mather, 1982: “The desertification of Central Otago has been described as one of the most dramatic examples of land degradation to have resulted from European expansion overseas during the nineteenth century.”
Flat Top Hill had 150 years of pastoral grazing before DOC took it over. Modified by exotic grasses and chewed out by rabbits and sheep. The “dregs” of lowland Central, as Matt put it. But now there’s a rich plant remnant diversity. And though there’s a mix of native and introduced species, there are 180 native species in this reserve, including the 13 ferns. Of the introduced species, thyme and the thorny sweet briar dominate. I recognise vipers bugloss, Californian thistle, St John’s Wort and the grey-leafed Hieracium.
“From a soil ecology point, Hieracium pilosella, or mouse-eared hawkweed, is not too much of a problem, but for farmers it displaces grasses,” Matt tells us. “Though the king- devil species, which is deciduous, leaves the soil that it colonises bare over winter, subject to freeze-thaw cycles that cause erosion.”
I’d seen what looked like bare earth on the sheep stations I’d walked over, on Blackstone Hill and north Rough Ridge. In one area, I’d come across a patch of grass so luxuriant I’d asked the farmer what was different, and he’d said, “There’s no Hieracium there.” And I realised, looking down, that what I thought I’d been walking over, close- cropped, drought affected grass, was indeed large tracts of Hieracium, its small flat leaves colonising the earth and preventing other plants from thriving.
Hieracium pilosella, or, as it’s now known, Pilosella officinarum, was by the 1990s the most widespread and significant introduced weed in our native grasslands. Seeds were probably introduced alongside exotic grass seeds when tussock lands were burnt and over sown. The lovely, wind-curving tall tussocks of the Chionochloa species disappeared from the high country pastoral acres, and in the bare sites left exposed, invasive, grazing-tolerant species like Hieracium thrived. Like thyme, it’s allelopathic. It smothers and displaces small native herbs and grasses, acidifies the soil nearby and makes life hard for the browntop and sweet vernal the farmers prefer.
I wondered later if such an arid plant was in fact a herb with medicinal properties. Its name was a clue—hieracium from the Greek word hierax, for hawk. A herbal site explained Pliny the Naturalist believed hawks ate the plant to strengthen their eyes. I find no salves for eyes from Hieracium, but plenty of online evidence of it being used in a tea as a diuretic, a cure for respiratory illnesses from asthma to whooping cough, boiled in milk for haemorrhoids, bruised and bound to any cut or wound to staunch bleeding and bring antibiotic protection, or as Culpeper wrote in his 17th century Complete Herbal, a “wound herb for wounds inward and outward”. For various requirements, steep five to ten grams of the dried plant in a litre of boiling water, strain, and drink two glasses a day...
And while we’re on the subject of introduced invasive species, Matt shows us the yellow-flowering stonecrop, or Sedum acre; a low-growing, succulent mat of fleshy green stems and yellow flowers, naturalized in New Zealand in 1904. “It’s a successful coloniser from sea level to 6000 feet,” Matt says. “Seeds pop them out. If you bust it, it will propagate vegetatively. When the TV tower was put on Old Man’s Range, they took gravel from down here, and took stonecrop with them. I spent ten years of on and off trying to eradicate it up in the Kopuwai ranges when working for DOC. You may kill it, but eradicate it?”
When a plant catalogue lists it as deer resistant, rabbit resistant, drought resistant, easy to grow, but can smother slower growing alpine plants, and so tough it can grow on the walls and roofs of houses, you know you’re in trouble. Or as Matt has found out, if it’s in the wrong place, you can’t kill it. Over the centuries it has gathered uses and names: Golden Moss, Biting Stonecrop, Prick Madam, Wallpepper. The name Welcome-Home-Husband- Though-Never-So-Drunk supposedly meant the plant, dried and powdered, enhanced virility. Other herbalists recommend the leaves split in two and the inner surface placed on corns or warts to remove them, though Culpeper warned, “It ought not to be put into any ointment, nor any other medicine.”
At six thirty in the morning, the sheep are still baaing. An over-lapping deep vibration in the early dawn; a massed choir of loss. I think of the farmers to whom this country is as familiar as their dogs’ faces, and this routine and swell of life cycles of parting and rebirth familiar too. A fertiliser truck rattles past on the road, for there are also the crops to be taken care of, the chaumolier for winter. When I turn in my bed on a morning of deep frost, the farmers will be out there, shifting the electric fence line or feeding out in slow, concentric circles on the glassy field. That wild innocence of the sheep, and the rough coated Hereford crosses, who cannot wonder at their place in all of this. The sheep who nip the sweet fresh lucerne under the pale morning sky while beyond them the mountains light up with a pink glow as if they are lit from within. And the next day the sheep and their lambs are clattering down the road to the woolshed, and the process of dividing begins.
I don’t know where this process of looking closely ends. The three orphan lambs the neighbours bottle-fed keep grazing, heads down, oblivious to the noise and calling of the sheep across the road from them. It’s perhaps beyond their ken, this fretting and baaing of the mothers, and the grass after last week’s rain is juicy and cool on the lambs’ tongues.
To know something is as different as not knowing as to be born or not born. When I looked at a YouTube clip, six months ago, of sheep in a chute being pushed towards the killing room at the freezing works, and saw their panic, how they tried to turn and run back, flinging themselves over those who were pushed up behind them, I saw—they want to live. I turned the video off. I said to myself, I can’t take any part in this again. (So joining my father, who had lived from the age of nine as a vegetarian.)
“It’s topography and aspect that determines biodiversity,” Matt says. He points to a rocky tor up the hill from our path. On its shady side, green thrives—there are tussocks, Coprosma, ferns, matagouri, Olearia odorata. And a gully he points out to us: “It’s too steep to have been grazed, and acts as a fire refuge as rain is diverted into it. Its orientation means it’s shady and not so affected by the sun, and that means more diversity.”
Closer to our path is a large rock, warmed by sun, and in front of it and clinging onto it, a sprawling, flattened plant with interlacing grey speckled branches, small green leaves and silvery spiky tips. Melicytus alpinus, Matt tells us. Porcupine shrub. He lifts a tangled branch to show us the purple-splashed white berries beneath it. I remember this plant now from up on top of the Hawkduns. The white blueberries.
“The skinks and geckos live in the crevasses of the rock and feed off these berries,” Matt tells us. “And in return the lizards scatter the seeds.”
“Oh, I know this plant,” Evelyn says. She bends to a small plant with shiny light green leaves and five petalled pink flowers, a delicate trace of colour beside the path. A plant I may have walked right by. “It’s one of the finest bitters,” Evelyn says. “I learnt about it on the herbal course I’m taking with Isla Burgess.”
The plant is Centaurium erythraea, a “pure bitter” as Isla quotes in her book The Biophilic Garden: “This plant is small, simple, delicate, yet when you taste any part of it—it is intense. A bitter bombshell explodes in your mouth...”
We pass by matagouri, Discaria toumatou, that thorny companion to high country tramping. It’s our only thorned native plant, a threatened plant in the North Island, and copious in the South Island though under threat. It’s not pretty. It doesn’t have graceful arching green leaves. It will never be made an emblem on our national flag or sports outfits. But in its own secretive ways, it adds to the richness of diversity in this hard-won life in the drylands. Its long thorns and impenetrable branches form a protective shield for lizards and birds who can rest and nest within its armour. Even without leaves in a drought, its stems and thorns carry out photosynthesis, and below the ground its roots, in a symbiotic relationship with fungi, fix nitrogen, allowing it to support itself without copious amounts of irrigation and fertiliser, and what’s more it enriches the ground to help support other plants. Its sap is sweet, its flowers fragrant. And yet, Matt tells us, farmers can, as a right under the District Plan, spray up to 50 hectares a year of it, killing not only the matagouri but the other grey leafed divaricating shrubs that live alongside it, the Melicytus and Coprosma propinqua, all of them homes to insects and birds. “You’re taking out a whole system,” says Matt.
Not everyone can see the matagouri’s right to existence. “This stuff makes gorse look like sheep’s wool,” Whale Oil reported on his online blog. “It’s only purpose is to provide a huge volume of prickles. A farmer got rid of some on his farm and it cost him $10,000 and fake remorse...” Once again proving what a hockey coach of Brian’s had said to him in the 60s: “It’s not the ignorance of some people that astounds. It’s the f... extent of it.”
“Progress and decline,” Brian says to Matt. “What do we have here, and what will we end up with?”
“Until we take in the well-being of all parts of the environment,” Matt replies, “we’re never going to take care of the world as it needs to be.”
Matt, Evelyn, Michael, Brian and I stand there beside the matagouri. It’s thyme in the air and the hot breath of wind on the stones and rocky soils, where the tumbleweed lichen settles and stirs, settles and stirs at our feet. A shadow passes over us and our faces tip up. A white breasted, black-backed gull floating in a blue sky.
“To see into the natural world beneath our feet and the world around us,” Michael Harlow writes to me later. “Such a fine reminder of our deep kinship with Nature; and a re- awakening to the fact that we too are part of the history of being. Looking at seed scatterings almost microscopic, leaf configurations, rock formations, and constellations of pebbles, and flowers and their colour-conversations; and patches of salt-sand risen over mega years to the surface ... And most revealing I think from this walk into the landscape, how the history of our being is about relationship to everything there is in the world.”
On a stretch of white, salty earth, we bend to our knees to examine a rare plant; New Zealand’s smallest grass, the critically endangered Puccinellia raroflorens. Across the bleached soils the grass looks like smudges, its fine leaves half covered in soil. This is a plant with most things against it, except for its resoluteness in the face of saline soils, freezing temperatures and burning hot sun. The salt pans are formed, scientists think, from the weathering of the ancient schist rocks and a combination of low rainfall and heat. There were once 40,000 hectares of salt pans in the Maniototo basin. Now there are less than 100 hectares, scattered over 30 sites and increasingly under threat from salt-tolerant weeds, and stray irrigation. In these few sites, there are maybe only 1000 plants of Puccinellia left in the world.
On the path home, Matt stops to pull out a vagrant, wilding pine. He points out a yellow-green shrub with bunched, papery white flowers. It stands firm surrounded by tussock and thyme. After the tiny grass, it seems sturdy, unthreatened.
“Ozothamnus,” says Matt. “Leptophyllus.” “Behold, Ozymandias,” says Brian.
“Jesus, Shelley,” says Michael.
And yet, here we are. Travellers in an ancient land.