The pōhutukawa boomed last summer. Thousands of trees blooming their hearts out, ridiculous masses of flowers, a red wave cloaking the battered coastlines, playgrounds, suburbs. It was the first pōhutukawa mast in 20 years. But something uglier was flourishing in those old-man branches, too: myrtle rust, a fungal disease that blew in seven years ago and spread rapidly. The long, wet summer, heralded by all that red, left pōhutukawa choked with spores. It’ll be a few years before the really big trees start to topple, scientists expect, but the rust is working on it.
Can you imagine the North Island without pōhutukawa? Rangitoto, stripped back to hot black rock?
Pōhutukawa shaded my first date with my husband, our wedding, and our first little house together. It was the first tree my son climbed, with a branch slung so low he could simply toddle up. Travelling home over the Auckland Harbour Bridge, other bus passengers swivel to check out the sea. I turn to the land and the receiving line of giants at Northcote Point, inspecting the damage from last summer’s storms, clocking whether any more trees have slipped or been cut back. From the office window we can see a pōhutukawa on Stanley Point that’s been in the act of falling off a cliff ever since Gabrielle. Hanging in there, as if by its toes.
To the extent that myrtle rust has had media attention, pōhutukawa has, unsurprisingly, been the poster child. But other species are going under, too. And with them go the ecosystems they support.
“Inside three years, hundreds of thousands of ramarama have vanished,” says Ngāti Porou kaitiaki Graeme Atkins, in a 2021 documentary that functions as a requiem for the species in his rohe, Tairāwhiti. Ramarama, he points out, fruits in the winter—without it, the birds and bats that depend on that foodsource will likely starve.
When an unassuming understorey sort of plant like ramarama blinks out, what fills the ecological niche? Privet?
As I read Ellen Rykers’ feature story on the rust and our truncated response to it, I started to wish that the trees would become sentient, that they’d rise up like Tolkien’s Ents, rip their feet from the ground and march on Parliament. Much of the journalism resource of New Zealand Geographic now goes into documenting environmental catastrophes. We try to get in early enough to make a difference, but repeated and unnecessary official failings loom large. For me, the decision not to renew funding to fight myrtle rust and safeguard precious genetic material from species in its sights sits near the top of that list.
Importantly, the ngahere does have an army on its side: teams of scientists and kaitiaki have been working with urgency to understand myrtle rust—and combat it. They’ve come up with promising weapons, too: fungi and insects with a taste for myrtle rust; seed-banking and resistance-testing programmes; antifungal spraying; and a high-tech new spray from Aussie that (in the lab, at least) not only protects plants, but also cleans up rust in plants already struggling.
All of this innovation is about to hit the wall. Funding for the optimistically named umbrella programme “Beyond Myrtle Rust” ends this month. Likewise, the Jobs for Nature teams that spent years monitoring the rust and developing ways to fight it are about to be left in the financial wilderness.
And so we are left with a pressing choice. Move on, push the rust from our minds, picnic under the pōhutukawa before those big swooping branches start crashing down. Or consider that blazing red summer a call for help.