Our lovely Oparara river has turned milk coffee brown after rain. A series of slips in the headwater last year means that every time it rains now the river fills with mud and sand (photo 1).
We have a stack of Pteris ferns here, known as Sweet fern or Brakes.
The typical fern here is Pteris macilenta, and there are two basic forms, strictly both are Pteris macilenta:
We have many, many filmy ferns in Karamea called Hymenophyllum. Kahurangi is a wet place and filmy ferns just love it.
If there's one thing that Kiwis love it's a good sarcastic name. This one is not really a grass, it's a sedge, but it looks like grass so the wide variety of these hook sedges in New Zealand are called "Bastard grasses".
Kahikatea (Dacrycarpus dacrydioides) is masting this year. A mast is a season of major flowering or seeding in a species.
Metrosideros fulgens is often known as Scarlet Rātā Vine. it is everywhere here late summer in to autumn.
It will climb to the top of tall trees, and sometimes you can see it flowering all the way up the sides of the tall Rimu on the Valley track. Really spectacular.