The Emblem of our Land

A silver fern (Cyathea dealbata/ponga) growing beside the road in Port Levy.

I wonder how many of those who have seen the silver fern thousands of times on sports jersies, and other representations, have ever seen one for real, and actually touched a live one. Further, of those who have seen them, how many have ever put them to one of their old time uses?

I did it once, and it saved me from a cold night out on a mountain side, without tent or sleeping bag. Let me explain...

It was in 1978, when I was making a very modest living in Auckland, editing Broadsheet (the feminist magazine) for twenty hours a week, and working for the Environmental Defence Society as an administrator for another twenty hours. One weekend I took a budget holiday break with a friend. We camped on a beach on the Coromandel one night, and the next evening we pitched our tent in the bush on Mt Te Aroha, about a fifteen minute walk up the main track from the township of Te Aroha. The campsite was barely a minute's walk into the bush from the track, but when we came back to it after eating dinner in town, it was almost too dark to see where the turn-off to the site was, and far too dark in the bush to see the tent.

If I hadn't fallen over a guy rope by accident we could have stumbled around for quite a while, and perhaps got seriously lost. We very much wanted to go back down the track to enjoy the hot pools for which Te Aroha is justly famed, but we also did not want to have to spend the night out in the open for lack of finding our way back to the tent. We had neglected to bring a torch with us. So what to do?

At this point I remembered reading about Maori war parties marking routes through the bush by cutting the fronds of silver ferns, and and laying them with the silver side upwards. When the moon is out, they make a silvery trail which is easily followed at night. Perfect for sneaking up on unsuspecting enemies - or tents.

There were silver ferns in the bush near our tent, and we only needed three or four fronds to mark our route to and from the track. As luck would have it, the sky was clear and the moon was shining. We had a good long soak in a hot pool, and found our tent afterwards with no trouble.

So the silver fern will never be just another quasi-corporate logo for me, and I will always think that a silver fern in the bush is worth two million on a TV screen.

Two Kiwi symbols on one tree - fern leaf and koru.