Friday Milo and I went to Hagley park for a few hours, the big central park in Christchurch that sports extensive botanical gardens and a lovely section of spring daffodils growing under tall beech trees. Milo smells flowers by blowing on them. The gardens were a lovely way to spend the 4 hours we had to kill waiting for the hitch to be installed on the car.

This “cabbage tree” is a signature New Zealand plant. Doesn’t look much like a cabbage to me, but Maori used to dig up the roots, grind them, dry them and eat them. That was before Europeans brought potatoes which were much easier to cultivate, cook and store. When my NZ plant encyclopedia arrives with all our stuff I’ll learn the plant family to which it belongs. Somehow knowing the plant family makes the world seem friendly and familiar.

Along with the daffodils are rows and rows of blooming cherry trees. Spring flowers seem to last a long time here, a perk of the weather is still pretty cool still. I thought Jeremiah’s colleague was just out of touch 6 weeks ago when he said the daffodils would be peaking in about 6 weeks (they were already starting then), but he was right.

Will I ever get enough of these luxurious ferns? Probably not. I love the new baby fronds coming up. They’re enormous, it’s like a nest of dinosaur eggs.

Milo really appreciated all the New Zealand native plants neatly labeled in the botanical garden. He found the stroll very relaxing.

Jeremiah got this picture at work showing all the vacant lots where buildings have been taken down after the Feb 2011 earthquake. Fulton Hogan is a big construction company (or destruction, as the case may be), and the photo was taken from their corporate helicopter. Whole city blocks are gone, and you can actually make out the colorful container mall just to the right of the remaining tall buildings. There are residential neighborhoods that will look like this too, once the insurance is straightened out and the houses are demolished. I guess it’s easy to see why there’s lots of engineering (and construction work) to be done here. Anyone want an adventure? They’re hiring.
We’ve heard a few first-hand accounts of the earthquake, all the residents remember their particular details with clarity. What this photo doesn’t show is the “liquefaction” the earthquake caused and all the damage to the underground water and sewer systems. Huge sections of the city are built on old swamp, as is the case with many cities in the world. In these areas the silty soils acted like a mud pie in the quake, turning to liquid and allowing buildings and roads to sink while sewers floated. Residents have reactions that run the gamut from traumatized to humorous, and no doubt we’ll continue to hear their stories for years to come.

Most of the buildings in downtown Christchurch are demolished by now (because of the February 2011 earthquake), but the open lots made room for a “container mall.” You know those dingy mundane metal boxes that sit on trains, trucks, and barges? Christchurch retailers have cleaned up and dressed up these metal boxes and positioned them into a colorful outdoor mall.

The mall even has a two-story coffee shop with lots of big glass windows (single pane, to be sure). The parking garage behind looks like it made it through the quakes. Kiwis call these things “car parks,” which in my mind always conjures up images of smiling vehicles careening down slides and bouncing on teeter totters.

You can even stroll down the mall promenade with your arm around your partner at the downtown container mall. Side note: kiwis seem to have “partners” more than spouses. Our American friend, trying to fit into the local scene, once referred to his wife as his “partner.” ONCE is the operative term here–he got an ear-full from his WIFE.

Domestic delights–fresh baked bread with honey and butter….in containers from the second hand shop of course. I can’t remember if we shipped bread pans or not, but I finally figured out a nice looking loaf without a pan, courtesy of baking paper, cornmeal and careful dough folding. Yay, a triumph!

I spent yesterday evening decorating the bee box shelves with pretty paper from the stationary store, and I’m tickled pink with the result. When I asked Jeremiah how he like them he looked up from the computer for a sec, testified to their colorful nature, and resumed his web surfing. The truth is he wouldn’t care if he lived in a black and white cave, but he has been married long enough to know that a cursory approval is necessary.

The Banks Peninsula is a humpy ancient volcano (now dead), eroded down to moderate height but still with steep slopes. It’s just southeast of Christchurch, making it a handy hiking spot for weekends when the southern alps are wet and nasty (this past weekend). We drove to Akaroa, the last town on the road, and from there hiked up hill, past dozens of sheep (of course, what else?) and over to Hinewai Reserve.

Hinewai reserve is tucked between the arms of the hills, in a particularly wet spot of the Banks peninsula. You can tell where the reserve starts because that’s where the trees and gorse begin.

Awww…. Nothin’ more to say about that photo

The fence keeps the livestock out of Hinewai, and that’s the point of the reserve. It contains one of the last virgin stands of trees on the Banks peninsula. You climb the style and jump back 150 years in time to what New Zealand was like before all the trees were cleared for pasture.

These are giant old beech trees in Hinewai. There’s similar to our beech in north America, but taxonomists have recently split them out into their own family. As lovely as this forest is, the really interest in Hinewai is Hugh, the caretaker. I regret not taking his photo! I’ll get the portrait on the return trip. Hugh is the caretaker of these trees and the whole reserve, and he lives up at the visitor’s center. We puffed up the hill and found Hugh bouncing along sporting short shorts and carpenters’ knee protectors, with a flannel shirt, knit cap, full white beard and twinkly blue eyes. He knows every plant and animal in that reserve by name, class, family, genus and species. And he loves them. He’s just like Old Tom Bombadil that Tolkien writes about.
“Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow,
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.
None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the master:
His songs are the stronger songs, and his feet are faster.”

I don’t know what the New Zealand flag looks like, some boring iteration of the Union Jack. But I do know the flag of the All Blacks, the Kiwi rugby team, because everyone flies it, wears it, and loves it. It’s a fern. Strange symbol for a tough rugby team but appropriate for New Zealand. This picture is looking up through a tree fern.

Three lone sheep were hanging out at the saddle of the hill. Domestic sheep all have docked tails, but these girls had tales hanging down to their hocks and look like they haven’t been shorn in more than a year. I wonder if they are escapees.

Walking back down the hill we passed this creepy grove of dead scorched gorse, looked just like Dr. Seuss’ Snidebush. I’m assuming they were intentionally burned, since they’re invasive plants here. The only line I could recall from the “Pale green pants with nobody inside them” story was “I went to pick a peck of Snide in a dark and gloomy Snide-field that was almost nine miles wide!” Looked for the pale green pants madly pedaling a bike, but only saw a dead sheep.

I finally found one thing that’s reasonably priced here, and it makes me HAPPY. Plants!
I stopped at Oderings Nursery with Milo this morning on my way to pick up a Trademe auction bookcase (of the cheap chipboard variety). The nursery stop was first so I could buy a cup of coffee there (they have a really neat cafe with plants growing on the walls) and get some cash back to pay for the bookshelf. Remember that cash-back trick you can do with a debit card in the states, but almost no one uses debit cards? They’re much more common here. I bought an overpriced cup of coffee, but it was apparently too early in the morning to have cash in the box to give me $10 back (yeah, whatever). That was Disappointing. But walking back into the greenhouses fixed the whole mood. They had primulas galore, and ranunculus, my favorites. They always remind me of lollypops and munchkins dancing. And we got the pleasant surprise that plants cost about the same here as they do in the states. We got a few, now we’ll need to get creative about how to house them….but we can do that.

Sharing is easy when there are too slides! The playground is providing all kinds of practice at taking turns and using good manners for both kids. The little girl is Maggie, youngest daughter of Jennifer and Eric, Americans from Phoenix who live around the corner from us in Halswell. Jeremiah and Eric work in the same building, and the very first weekend we were at the new house they invited us over for a hot soup dinner (it’s winter here, remember). You’d think that here in a new country we’d be all about meeting Kiwis, but actually it’s really great to have American friends. It’s funny how comforting it is to complain about the high prices and crumby housing with someone who understands…..but we also do some constructive appreciation of good Kiwi things. Hum, let me think….. I’ll get back to you on the good things once I make a list.

Last weekend we went to Kaikoura, a small town on that peninsula that juts out into the pacific ocean. It seems a little funny to have such a tidy looking landscape of verdant fields and trimmed hedgerows next to the tall craggy mountains. Loads of farms, thousands of kilometers of fencing, zillions of sheep and millions of cows….but very few barns and even fewer grain crops. All the milk and the meat is grass fed by default.

We stayed in a hostel in Kaikoura. Nothing fancy, but it’s fun to hear where other people are from, chit-chatting in the living room after dinner, hovering around the wood stove (called a “log burner” here).

In the background are limestone bluffs, ancient sedimentary rocks formed under oceans that are getting pushed up by hard-to-fathom plate tectonics. We walked around the whole peninsula, picking up shells and chasing seagulls (Milo).

No, he’s not barking, he’s just yawning. Seals lounge around on the rocks like gigantic slugs. I really wanted to poke them to see if they felt firm or soft and to find out if they would move….but I’m a mom now, need to set a good example. And besides, all the posted signs said “No touching seals.”

I’m coming back here in the summer when the water is warmer, to wade in the tide pools and feel the dozens of different species of slimy seaweed. Jeremiah wants to come back to, with a wet suit and snorkel, to hunt for paua and lobster (called crayfish here).

The hills look haphazardly terraced from a distance, but it’s the animal paths that we’re seeing. The sheep and cattle walk across the face of the slopes instead of straight up and down, so their paths make ribbons on the grassy hills. Smart ruminants. Pastures cover the whole peninsula, right up to the bluffs.

That’s a pretty distinct snow line on these mountains, eh? They’re around 3000m high. I like seeing the shapes of the mountains in all the places we’ve just been (Hawaii, Alaska, Adirondacks, NZ), and thinking about the ancient geological history that made the bedrock that erodes in such drippy droopy patterns.

It’s strange to think how much humans have altered the landscape, then to realize that other grazing animals like sheep and cattle drastically change the earth’s surface too. I guess that’s just part of life on earth. Hard to figure out the idea of conservation, while at the same time we (or our animals) are using almost every square inch. But if humans aren’t using it, other animals are using it and changing it too. Maybe that’s all part of the cycle. Give it some time, the ocean will rise, and all this human impact on the land will be swallowed up.

Someday Milo will be embarrassed that he was sucking on his chewy, but it was easier than listening to his whining while he tried to fall asleep. He doesn’t seem to notice the views, even impressive ones like this, looking down from Mt Fyffe into the valley near Kaikoura.

Baby and Daddy, and they even match. Aw! There was a grassy clearing near the DOC hut on Mt Fyffe that Milo enjoyed.

These are the small mountains, around 2500 meters….the ones in the center of the island bump up another 1000 meters. They’re still growing at a fast (geologically speaking) pace of 1 cm/year. It’s strange to think of instruments being sensitive enough to measure that growth, because at the surface all I can see is erosion.

Yowzers, this is a fern! Susannah my friend and colleague at CCE picked out a NZ plant book and gave it to me before we left. She was so excited, flipping through the pages and pointing to exotic specimens. “They even have ferns the size of trees!” she gushed. She was right. Jeremiah wanted to cut it down to see what the inside looked like.

This looks to be the native “bush” that once clothed these mountains. The trees are rather like overgrown rhododendrons in size, and they all have shiny waxy leaves of some type. When it’s sunny it looks rather nice, but I’m glad I’m not bushwacking these steep slopes.

Well no, not really graves, but the newly turned garden beds rather look like that, don’t they? And it got you to read the blog post, didn’t it?

I got myself a shovel, a new one instead of a second hand jobber, only to find out that shovels are sold blunt here. I bought a V shaped shovel (“spade”) but the metal edge is rounded. Store clerks look at me like I have 2 heads when I ask about getting them sharpened, and assure me that they still push into the soil. Well, yes, they do, but with a lot of extra effort. I finally found one old timer who said that lawnmower shops can sharpen it for me.

I hear a jingle in the kitchen as I’m sitting on the back step, using the quiet of Milo’s nap time to plan our weekend trip….no one is in the house as far as I know, but I’ve become jumpy since my wallet was stolen. Turns out this little dog was the culprit. His license tag declared that his name was Toby and his (or his owner’s) cell number was listed too. AND he had pooped on the kitchen floor. Milo wasn’t quite sure whether he liked Toby or was scared of Toby, but Toby was a friendly little fellow, and the cleaning lady from whom he had escaped came and collected him in short order. I hope he visits again, but that he remembers his toilet training.