New Zealand: State Highway 6

It’s not unusual to drive around New Zealand and find scenic things within sight of the road. Today marks a year and a day since we were heading south from the Franz Josef Glacier along State Highway 6 when I stopped to photograph the waterfall shown above. What all those dark patches on the rocks were, I don’t know, but I welcomed the extra texture into my photograph. From the other side of the road I looked down the steep embankment at a different sort of waterfall in the stream below:

The day before, I’d been taken by the “walls” of ferns growing right at the edge of the pavement along some stretches of the same highway further north. Here’s one of those fern-formed walls.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: non-flowering and flowering

Even if that pōhutukawa (Metrosideros excelsa) wasn’t blooming at Cape Reinga on February 14, 2017, several of the flax plants (Phormium tenax) there were. Now you can say you got some flowers on Valentine’s Day.

The Wikipedia article about this genus notes that “Phormium tenax flowers have the same curvature as the beak of the nectar eating Tui.” You can verify that in a photograph from our 2015 trip to New Zealand.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman