Nīkau palm

New Zealand is like southern California and Florida and Arizona and other places where people have planted plenty of alien palm trees, but New Zealand does have one native species, Rhopalostylis sapida, commonly known as the nīkau palm. Here you see a nīkau palm that I photographed in the forest at the Parry Kauri Park in Warkworth, in the northern part of the North Island, on the afternoon of February 6. Note the various tree ferns near the palm (and if I seem to be above some of them, it’s because I was indeed standing at a higher point and aiming sideways with the camera oriented vertically, so the wide-angle lens pulled in some of the ferns below me).

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman