Ti kouka, the New Zealand cabbage tree, at Lake Hawea, Southern Lakes District. Roy Sinclair

Footprints in the Landscape: New Zealand's Cabbage Trees

Posted by Roy Sinclair in Travel Tips & Advice
Wednesday, 26 August 2009

Early summer, those distinctive native plants with their poetic Maori name ti kouka burst into bloom, their ungainly bunches of creamy white flowers enhancing New Zealand’s rural and urban landscapes. Seeing them bloom once more all around Christchurch has got my fingers tapping at the keyboard.

Ah, you say, "ti kouka? Don’t you mean the cabbage tree?"

Cabbage tree is indeed the regrettable name Captain Cook gave to these iconic New Zealand natives with spiky leaves sprouting from tall trunks. In 1769 when Cook’s Endeavour was anchored at Ship’s Cove in Queen Charlotte Sound he had his crew boil up the trees’ young inner leaves. They discovered a nutritious vegetable-like plant, able to combat the deficiency of vitamin C – a cause of the seafarers’ dreaded disease, scurvy.

Cook so named the tree owing to the cabbage being a staple vegetable in European society. But cabbage is also the most unappetising of vegetables. The awful smell of boiled cabbage in bulk is better associated with boarding school dining rooms, even prisons. Yuk!

The European botanical genus is cordyline associating the cabbage tree with the family of tree lillies. The most common species found throughout New Zealand is cordyline australis.

New Zealand botanist Philip Simpson wrote a fascinating book Dancing Leaves: The Story of New Zealand’s Cabbage Tree, Ti Kouka. Beautifully illustrated and published in 2000 by Canterbury University Press, it is undoubtedly the most comprehensive cabbage tree study to date.

Along with his extensive botanical treatise, Simpson writes wonderful descriptions about the pliable leaves responding to every breath. Their quiet rustling is cabbage tree chatter. Sometimes they will bend in unison, as if bowing politely. In a storm, they will all stream in one direction, tugging violently at their trunks. He says the cabbage tree looks like “something Dr Seuss might have dreamt up.”

Maori travellers used the cabbage tree to guide them through the landscape. In the South Island cabbage trees marked much of the route across the Southern Alps when Maori were seeking the West Coast Pounamu, or greenstone. Hence, the name ti kouka – footprints in the landscape.

Maori people also have a proverb “He rau ti-pinaki, he arero wahine”. It refers to the long leaf of the cabbage tree being like the talkative tongue of a woman.

Leaves were weaved to make rope stronger than that from flax. They could be fashioned to make sandals and baskets. When softened by rubbing, the leaves were applied as an ointment to skin wounds. And Maori believe the early flowering of the cabbage tree is an indication of a long hot summer. This is something meteorological experts, keen to hang onto their jobs, understandably reject.

Not so long ago I saw this New Zealand native blooming profusely in Cornwall and Devon. One time, Cornwall was promoted on British Railway posters as the English Riviera. To ensure the (doubtful) subtropical image, the posters featured a “palm” tree, none other than ti kouka. Ti kouka has also featured as a tourism board logo to give Cornwall its continental ambience. The “palms” identify the region, flourishing splendidly in gardens, and represented in motifs on T-shirts and hats. St Ives has “The Palms” motels.

Cordyline australis from the cooler regions of New Zealand’s South Island, has become a striking botanical feature of Britain’s south-western landscape. It was successfully introduced during the 1820s.

A species that became known as the Torquay Palms was planted in Torquay on the south Devon coast by a New Zealander, Mr Pottage, when Torquay was a rehabilitation centre for New Zealanders wounded from World War I.

Yet when it was suggested to locals that their palms were not English, but New Zealand natives, they typically rewarded my utterances with that “he’s a bit of a bonkers colonial” look.

Christchurch’s Burnside High School has a huge cabbage tree in its grounds. Once used to guide Maori and early European settlers though Canterbury’s swamplands, the cabbage tree hence became a school symbol with an accompanying Latin motto that translates, “Take the right path”. Now, that’s cool.

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