Threefold 16
visiting the herbarium, watching the ginkgo, and hagstones
Welcome to the Threefold Letter. This month a sneak peek into the Auckland Museum herbarium, a ginkgo undresses for winter, and a return to Tongapōrutu and its strata of stone and time
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A selection of red, brown, and green seaweeds are pressed and glued to specimen sheets and laid out along the table on the mezzanine floor of the herbarium at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum. Seaweeds are macroalgae and while green and red seaweeds are considered plants in the Plantae kingdom (feudal terms within biology are such a wonder!), brown seaweeds are more closely aligned with animals and fungi. Unlike when pressing non-oceanic plants which are laid on the page and pressed, ‘pressing’ seaweeds for herbaria involves floating the specimen onto the page and into formation.
On the first of the month, I attended a tour of the herbarium with associate curator of botany Yumiko Baba. We began in the main workroom with the seaweed specimens, and heard about seaweeds and lichens from botany curator Dan Blanchon. Off the main workroom is a processing room with a large drying machine where freshly pressed specimens are packed to dry at carefully specified temperatures. Beside it is a large chest freezer where specimens are frozen as part of the preventive conservation process (to ensure there are no live insects). Downstairs, beneath the workroom mezzanine floor, are rows upon rows of museum storage shelving, and every shelf is filled with boxes all of the same size, each housing many specimens attached to herbarium sheets measuring around 30 x 40cm (11.5 x 16.5 inches) and each sheet is enveloped in its own acid free folder. The storage is tight and perfect.
In specially locked red cabinets are specimens collected by Banks and Solander and we take a look at a Cyathea dealbata, a silver fern. Dated 1769, it is still as perfectly new as any of my pressed specimens from last year: the white undersides are still white!
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For three weeks from mid-June, I photographed a Ginkgo in the domain: 19th, 24th June, 1st July. The weather turns into July, the sky hangs lower in grey, and the tree denudes, first of its green, then the golden hue drops too and the ground beneath it is a golden pool.
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The river has changed its shape in Tongapōrutu. It is ever threading its way through the movable sand dunes, building mud, shifting sand, reflecting Ranginui. The walk to the beach was ankle deep mud slick. I was in borrowed gumboots, and so careful of my footing because the mud is slick against the rocks that only a year or so ago was washed in salt, rather than silt. The tide is far out, an hour or so before its turning. But the walk feels perilous nonetheless for its risk of falling.
We passed many people who had given up on their shoes, carrying them, now grey brown and slimy, with mud up their calves and between their toes. One family had put plastic bags over their shoes, but one of their group was wearing a pair of square heeled shoes. The plastic over their feet was long pierced and instead held additional mud in its crevices, shoes long ruined.
And suddenly we reached sand. The air held the smell of a carcass, far off, faint in the smell of salt. The day we walked out to the beach was at the tail end of some epic weather. Red weather warnings had swirled above and below the night before, where Tongapōrutu remained yellow on the map. But that weather had flung up a menagerie of animals that had gotten caught up in it. Bloating now, and rotting, feeding the sea and the fishes.
The sea stacks were ever stunning with their strata lines telling stories. The spume frothy pools of water foamed around the stacks and huge rocks, concentric. The sea bubbled with it, algal blooms churned up in the surf.
It had been a few years since my last visit. I’m surprised it had been so long. The sky and sand and sea and river and stacks and patterns and surfaces and colours and light and smells and the trek there over the sand and the wild weather aftermath and the blue, grey cloud streaked sky and the threat of rain and the sinking sun and the warm yellow peach edging into the horizon – it all opens out and I feel small and inconsequential and infinitely material and real and here.
And there are stones. Stones shaped by the ebb and flow and thrust and pull of the sea and time, and there are stones with holes through them. I don’t ever seem to see them myself. But my friends do. They spot them and suddenly they are gifted and loaned and weighing down my pockets.
What a way to see time but through stones. Standing between stacks, peeking through holes made by water and time. Water and time. The river changed its shape in Tongapōrutu, ever-changing its shape. Ever in motion and making ways of waiting and looking and seeing and being.
