I love citrus season – lemons, limes, oranges and mandarins arrive exactly at the right time to ward off the winter lurgies.
I take 1/2 tsp baking soda in a little warm water followed by the juice of half a lemon when the first tickle of a lurgy arrives and repeat it every four hours to remain cold and flu free all winter.
Non-native ‘New Zealand oranges’ have the rich juicy taste of orange blossom smell, unlike the pale, insipid American variety that do not compare. Whatever is in NZ soil certainly makes Otago apricots more flavoursome than Turkish ones. We all know that while kiwifruit is world famous, it’s actually a Chinese gooseberry. So many things grow better here but they’re from elsewhere. Apricots, oranges and lemons all originated in Southeast Asia and were first cultivated in China around 2500 BC. The first written ‘lemonade’ recipe comes from 12th Century Egypt. I never had broccoli (from Eastern Mediterranean) as a child; we ate cauliflower. It was cultivated from cabbage flower in Asia Minor. Now, broccoli has become more popular than cauliflower, my nephew calls white broccoli.
Luckily, Māori brought food sources with them, as Aotearoa food source was mainly birds. They brought karaka (now considered ’native’ yet it was introduced) for berries as a type of fermented ‘flour’, rats and 14 varieties of kumara with them from the Pacific Islands only to discover that they didn’t grow as well in a cooler climate. They therefore built scoria mounds on the northern sides of hills to create a warmer place for them to grow, as can be seen on Mangere Mountain. I remember Pita Turei telling that whalers brought potatoes that pretty much changed the lifestyle of Māori because they grow so profusely.
Let’s face it, all our fruit trees are ‘exotics’ along with most of our food and flowers that they originated from all over the world. There are very few native foods we eat other than fish and shellfish, and kawakawa for a tea. Luckily, native birds are off the menu because since human settlement, over the past 750 years, at least 51 birds, one bat, three frogs, three lizards, one freshwater fish, four plant species and a number of invertebrates and insects have become extinct in New Zealand. Bat populations have dropped by 70% since the removal of ‘Tree Protection’ 10 years ago. The long-tailed bat deserved to win Forest and Bird, ‘Bird of the Year’ 2021. I’m hoping that the Maui dolphin is entered this year as it does ‘fly through the air’ when it leaps from the sea, and certainly deserves to be saved from extinction and fishing.
When a species self introduces they are considered ‘native’. Monarch butterflies introduced themselves when they got blown off course attempting to winter in the trees of Mexico. In the 1840s they found a food source in swan plants grown by the settlers growing kapok for mattresses. Breeding four generations a year, their DNA is different from their American ancestors 740 generations ago.
People whose heritage can all be traced back to Africa, according to our DNA, are raping and pillaging our environment and have the audacity to blame trees, particularly on the volcanic cones of Auckland, for ‘colonisation’ because they originated from elsewhere. These hypocritical people happily eat non-native fruit.
Trees don’t have a racist bone in their bodies. The big trees make more food than they need so they feed it to any variety of plant living under their shelter from the sun. On the way past the mycelium (fungi in the soil), take a ‘toll’ for their good ‘work’ and feed the nursery of seedlings. It is called the ‘Wood Wide Web’. This ‘nursery of babies’ on the maunga and in Western Springs before it was destroyed are mostly natives mostly ‘planted’ by bird poo from the kererū flying between the native forest of the Waitakere Ranges and the Islands of the Gulf. They used to stop to rest in the canopy but now that it has gone, they don’t stop off. Without the forest there is no longer the call of roosting morepork or tui who are frightened of being too close to the ground.
The hypocritical behaviour of human beings is doing so much damage to our environment that it is time for us to recognise it as an ‘entity unto itself’ that needs to be protected by having ‘human status under the law’ so that it can have its own legal representation. It certainly would have saved the ‘Significant Ecological Area’ of Western Springs, 15,000 natives and $2,000,000. (Gael Baldock)
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