Sawtooth

I’m enjoying roaming around the garden and pointing the PlantNet app at things. One small shrub I liked had slim jagged leaves with a median stripe. I was also curious about the tall bushy-topped trees that tower over the left-hand side of the house. Today I found out that these two were actually the same species: lancewood/horoeka (pseudopanax crassifolius). They look so different! I learnt that having wild contrasts like this between juvenile and adult plants is called “heteroblasty“.

One theory goes that the long-extinct moa wasn’t fond of grazing on the spiky leaves, but once the tree was beyond moa height, it no longer had to defend itself. The mature trunk is branch-less and the leaves high up in the canopy are broad and without teeth.

We have a few similar but wider-leaved plants on our jungly bank that look like they could be a coastal five-finger/houpara (pseudopanax lessonii) instead, or a hybrid of the two. At least some of the lancewood seem to have self-seeded because they appear in a few peculiar spots: hiding under the big camellias, and lurking by the letterbox.