My writing, it turns out, draws her inspiration from the natural world. From the sphere of the non-human, the fascination with the animal and arboreal. I spend many moments reading facts of wonder; learning about the movements and the magic of the landscape around me, of the creatures within it, and finding those understandings enriching my own life.

The Wonder Files is an extension of that fascination, a gentle call to activism and to care. A weekly love letter that I share with you of a creature or a plant that’s caught my interest in the hope you’ll find them as wild and wonderful as me.

Wonder, I believe is a portal to care. To hold and grow a sense of wonder leads to love, to kindness, to respect and admiration. When we see something with wonder, we are moved to protect it.

Something the world around us could use a little more of.

So here you are, with me, for the Wonder Files.

 I hope you delight in them as much as I do.

The Monkey Puzzle Tree || Pewen || Araucaria Araucana

 

My place- my place I call my home- is not defined by land deeds or by fences but by geographic zones.

To the northeast, the ocean known as the Pacific fuses her salty self into my cells.

To the south, the border of Manuka mixed in with planted Poplars delineates a line dividing that which is familiar, my little farm on one side, and a paddock less discovered on the other.

To the northwest, the old volcano, Mopanui, her rocks still scattered on the shoreline, her flanks and sides thick with Fuchsia, Kanuka and the fifty shades of green that define New Zealand native lands.

I work from home and most of all that matters to me resides here, the green belts of more populated zones only half an hour away often unknown and unfamiliar, yet to be discovered jewels, a welcome breath that weave their way through town.

My youngest son, Tommy, is an avid climber. On Saturday’s, he’s been going to a climbing club, run by a partnership of arborists and tree scientists who arrange rainbow ropes within branches like multi coloured beanstalks leading to the heaven zone.

The first tree that I met there made me marvel. A magnificent Oak, her fullness more than worthy of a photo, the likes of which could never hope to catch the splendour she radiated in real life.

I know this is going to sound crazy, I said to Katy, the leader of the climb and this, the first time that we’d met, but I get the sense that this tree really wants to be climbed.

She turned to me, her face lit up, delighted.

I feel that too, she replied. I really feel that too.

I thanked the tree for her generous collaboration, the offering of her steady arms to hold my feisty child. And most Saturday’s since, I am taken on a tree adventure, a journey of leafy discovery outside my geographic zone, to the base of trees I have yet to feel the skin of, and whose messages I’m yet to be shown.

It was on one such excursion I met the Monkey Puzzle Tree, in a park, in the northeast of Dunedin. With Tommy scaling the heights of a massive Macrocarpa, I strolled the garden grounds only to be halted by the trunk of a midsize Monkey Puzzle.

I stood for many moments and just stared. The patterns on her trunk appeared like an etched in meditation, a myriad of eyes ever evolving and increasing as you scanned your way further up the trunk.

At the top, a cluster of spiky leaves all bunched together in conical arrangement, her appearance equally drawing and defensive. And yet the longer I stood near her, I found her very gentle. Watchful. Knowing.  I wanted to learn more.

I wanted to learn more about the Monkey Puzzle tree, the story she carried in her roots.

The wisdom that lay behind her eyes.

I wanted to know everything, and here is what I found.

 

What’s your favourite dinosaur? Tommy asks.

Diplodocus, I reply, without a second thought.

They seem kind, I continue, an assertion based on little true knowledge or understanding. And for some reason, I just really like their long necks. They’re so…elegant.

Diplodocus for sure, I say again, nodding my head.

My Monkey Puzzle, it turns out, may well have met my elegant Diplodocus. A remnant of the Jurassic era, Araucaria Araucana, the Monkey Puzzle’s official grown up name, and one that I’m prone to mispronounce, is a part of an ancient lineage of Conifers known as living fossils, out surviving dinosaurs, and long enough to have ancestors growing on shores of foreign lands and find me standing at their feet.

I delight in the 200 -million-year-two-degrees-of-separation.

I think about my Monkey Puzzle friend, connecting me and my Diplodocus.

Scientists believe that their sharp and spiky leaves may have evolved as protection from the hungry mouths of herbivorous dinosaur predation.

I read on further still.

Britannica Online describes them as an evergreen ornamental which on further investigation I find intriguing. Perhaps even insulting. Our colonised viewpoint of the world takes so much out of context; to relegate the Monkey Puzzle to the purely ornamental is to really miss the point.

 

If we trace back to her homeland, the Monkey Puzzle is native to the foothills of the Andes, to Chile and Argentina. These are regions that experience nature in some of her fiercest forms; the realms of the fire and the volcanic.

Consequently, the Monkey Puzzle evolved to have a thick and protective bark, putting them at an advantage over their less equipped counterparts in the inevitable event of fire sweeping through.

But beyond that, Araucaria Araucana, is a mother, a nurturer, a producer. The Monkey Puzzle is a dioecius tree, meaning that some are male and some are female. The female trees produce large and heavy cones, sometimes as much as eight inches across, containing more than 200 nutrient dense seeds.

In autumn, when natural food sources in the region are still restricted, the Monkey Puzzles feeds the mouths of many, both bird, animal and human. Studies have also shown a relationship between the Monkey Puzzle and the Astral Parakeet, a forest dwelling parrot, who cracks open the cones allowing others around to access all her seeds.

I wonder, on reading the true nature of the Monkey Puzzle as enriching and sustaining, what else we miss by forcing living beings into contexts they aren’t designed to thrive?

What else have we relegated to the realm of ‘ornamental’ when their real truth and purpose exists as anything but?

The indigenous Mapuche people fought to have the tree protected, so important is their existence to both themselves and to their lands. They continue working to rebuild their populations, in the hope that these ancient trees will one day thrive.

And what’s more, the Monkey Puzzle is now endangered, a product of forest logging, of climate change, from farming, invasive species and grazing animals. With a lifespan that can extend to 1200 years, the Monkey Puzzle tree is under threat.

Evolving to outlive dinosaurs but perhaps not outlive humans.

I think back to my Monkey Puzzle friend standing in the park.

In some ways I understand her. A foreigner making her home in different soil.

I remember her and ask,

How do we help each other thrive in situations that are unknown and unfamiliar?

How do we move beyond what we first see, past the ornamental and the obvious, the façade?

How do we help each other make sense of a world we may not be designed for?

 

My writing, it turns out, draws her inspiration from the natural world. From the sphere of the non-human, the fascination with the animal and arboreal. I spend many moments reading facts of wonder; learning about the movements and the magic of the landscape around me, of the creatures within it, and finding those understandings enriching my own life.

The Wonder Files is an extension of that fascination, a gentle call to activism and to care. A weekly love letter that I share with you of a creature or a plant that’s caught my interest in the hope you’ll find them as wild and wonderful as me.

Wonder, I believe is a portal to care. To hold and grow a sense of wonder leads to love, to kindness, to respect and admiration. When we see something with wonder, we are moved to protect it. Something the world around us could use a little more of.

So here you are, with me, for the Wonder Files. I hope you delight in them as much as I do.

***

The Giant Weta

It’s summertime. I know this because the calendar tells me that’s the case. It’s January, and in the southern hemisphere that means short sleeves and T-shirts.

It means stone fruit that leave stains around your lips, and the lusciousness of languid weather that frames all activity within the context of being slightly easier.

Except, that it’s not. Summer, in my little corner of New Zealand is more of a suggestion than a certainty. The change in light is something to rely on. The change in temperature? Not so much.

This year, we’ve taken liberties to push our suggestion of summer out by weeks, or even months.

Summer comes slightly later here, we tell ourselves. It doesn’t really kick in ‘til after Christmas.

When Christmas comes and summer doesn’t, we remark how it seems to be that we’re caught in an easterly flow. Than when the air currents change, we’ll find the sun hiding just behind them. That actually, Autumn is the best season anyway.

Such is the constant optimism of unsettled weather types.

Here, on the edge of my tidal estuary, the energy of air abounds with a certain meteorological fierceness, lending a vibrational pulse to the surrounds that stings the cheeks with an inherent sense of aliveness. My ability to embrace our changing weather patterns sits stubbornly alongside my desire for the sun; for a natural warmth to start first at my skin, seeping through to my blood, warming me to the marrow of my bones.

I peer outside the window thinking this seems a lot to ask.

To be a part of this landscape; to be a part of this place requires a level of flexibility that for humans, might mean starting in a T-shirt whilst holding the possibility that progressing to a jacket within the hour sits within the likely and expected.

For the animals, the true wanderers of the elements, this translates to something quite different. A level of adaptability that leaves their human neighbours reeling in their dust. And the Giant Weta, the largest insect on the planet, holds the gold medal standard of possibility for this prize.

A creature that can literally die and bring her or himself back to life.

A creature whose capacity to weather the changing storms is something I constantly aspire to.

If you aren’t familiar with the Weta, a good point of reference would be to think of a cricket or a grasshopper. A distant relation to the giant Cricket species found in Africa, the “Giant” part of their name derives from the fact they can weigh more than a large sparrow or a mouse.

The Weta family, it turns out, are split into groups of around 70 different types, deriving their name from their native Te Reo Maori, of Weta Punga, whose literal translation means “God Of Ugly Things”.

Fortunately, while our names might be inherited, the individual experience of beauty is not so fixedly prescribed. As I look at the Weta, I see not an ugly creature, but something quite remarkable. A being with delicate limbs, a shell like casing on his body that has an ancient feel, like I’m stepping back in time.

A display of both refinement and resilience, existing side by side.

More fascinating still, my intuition proves me right;  Weta are basically unchanged from when they first appeared, approximately two hundred million years ago. A living dinosaur in fact.

I think about two degrees of separation. I wonder, as I look at this amazing insect, what the clay of his body remembers. How I’m closer to all the bodies of all the creatures that roamed before by sitting closer to his.

I wonder how still I have to sit to make him accept me and not fear me.

I wonder what it would take to be a part of his landscape, rather than a predator within it.

Up until recently, Weta had no natural predators in New Zealand. With no native mammals living here (a fascinating fact we’ll explore another day), the Weta took on the role that mice and small rodents do in many countries, eating the leaf litter, berries, and seeds.

It’s even thought they may have been amongst our earliest pollinators, their presence an indication of the ecosystem and wellbeing of the forest.

Humans, it turns out, and the creatures we introduced, have become their greatest threat. Knowledge that grates on me as I sit in the soil and observe.

At 44 years old, I have lived the life span of 44 Giant Wetas. And yet, over the cycle of a year, they moult or shed their exoskeleton up to eleven times.

In human years and by my age, that’s 484 rounds of shedding skin. I’m not sure I’ve kept up.

You’re very good, I tell my Giant Weta friend, at letting yourself be new. To learn to shed your skin and leave behind what’s no longer relevant or needed is something we can learn from you.

I sit a few moments longer, consider the worries that I continue holding onto; the skins I have shed or need to, to allow a new version of myself to take up space.

I let my eyes trace the horizon, my gaze moving up the mountain. Weta, often live in the high mountains of New Zealand; if we speak of cold, it is there that you will find it. With temperatures often reaching below freezing, there is a real possibility of Weta’s freezing too.

And remarkably, that’s exactly what they do. To avoid an icy death, the Weta dehydrates every cell in their great and tiny body. A special protein is added to the excess water between cells that acts like ancient antifreeze, allowing for their re-emergence, come the spring, from death and back to life.

I love that this giant, small creature, the one that we call ugly, the one that treads the undergrowth of the forest, has carried their form through from ancient times. That their footprints bear the signature of ancient lands.

I love that this giant, small creature has such strong threads of seasonal connection, to allow them to leave this life and return to it just the same.

That their body continues to expand to incorporate, and not limit to reduce, the fullest expression of their form of this planet, the previous versions of themselves left as ghosts on the land they continue to inhabit.

What else might we learn from the Giant Weta?

What are all the ways we can lose our skin and journey back to life?