 Walk through the courtyard
of the chancellor’s complex and
you’ll find a plant so peculiar it would be more at home with
Horton and the Whos: a tree with pendulous, hairy appendages, hanging
from the branches down to the ground. Or are they
groping upward?
In fact they are the aerial roots of this New Zealand
Christmas tree, or Pohutukawa in Maori. Besides doing what roots
normally
do, they act as guy wires helping these trees cling to the rocky,
windswept, coastal cliffs of their native country.
The tree’s name comes from the bright red eucalyptus-like
flowers that bloom profusely around Christmas (summertime in New
Zealand). In the 1950s, these trees were the inspiration for a series
of children’s books. Avis Acres wrote
fairy stories about cherubic Pohutukawa spirits, with
hair the color of the tree’s crimson blossoms. The
books also delivered prescient conservation messages—as if
an antipodean Lorax was trying to save
the Truffula trees. The Pohutukawa is now threatened
in New Zealand due to land management practices and
the introduction of non-native possums who feed on it.
Contributors to Making Waves: Jessica Demian, Raymond Hardie, Heather Henter, Evelyn Hsieh, '05, Sue Pondrom.
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