Our Changing World: Resurrecting Wellington’s Flowers of the Underworld

The mud slips below my boots as I slide down the slope. I grab a root to keep myself from tumbling down the steep, bush-clad gully. Ahead of me, a small crew of seasoned ecologists and kaitiaki have their heads down, shaping rolls of wire mesh into a cage around a fallen ponga. They are on a mission - trying to save a bizarre parasite thought to have gone extinct in the Wellington region more than a hundred years earlier: Te pua o Te Rēinga - "the flower of the underworld". But this parasit