The OTHER New Zealand flax

 Rauhuia flowering 
beside the road 
to my home.

For most people 'New Zealand flax' means the magnificent harakeke, or Phormium tenax. This is indeed a wonderful plant, both dramatically beautiful and extremely useful. Its fibre can be used to make rope and sails, as well as clothing, bags and other useful items. It was therefore of potential interest to those who financed Captain James Cook's exploratory voyages of the southern oceans, because home-grown British supplies of linen flax for these purposes were insufficient by the late eighteenth century, and substitute fibres were being sought.

Cook saw that Maori had many uses for harakeke, and reported back that
there was good 'flax' to be had in New Zealand. The first people who
subsequently came looking for 'flax', though, could not find anything they
recognised as linen flax, Linum usitatissimum. (This European plant also produces linseed, a source of valuable oils.)

Yet New Zealand does have its own endemic member of the Linum genus,
L. monogynum, or rauhuia. It is a neat little plant with a pure white flower, which is in bloom right now. It usually grows in inhospitable sites, such as dry banks and cliffsides near the sea. It can even cope with introduced grasses, which are normally death to NZ natives.

Its sky-blue European cousin, L. perenne, is the flax most often grown as a border plant in NZ gardens. It is well worth giving space, both for its colour and for the way that the whole plant sways gracefully in the wind. But rauhuia also deserves a place in the flower border. This is recognised in the UK, where the BBC gardening website can tell you more about the plant and growing it than any New Zealand site I have seen.

Rauhuia is not a long-lived plant, but it is easy to grow from seed and keep replenishing that way. I had very good germination recently from two year old seed which I collected from plants growing on roadside banks on the Purau-Port Levy road. I think the full grown plants will look very nice next November, when they are flowering under a pink or red rose.

Rauhuia is happy growing on dry banks and cliffs.