With a week or so to fill in before a Botsoc camp on the West Coast at New Year, we headed for Golden Bay to visit old friends and places. One particularly rich spot is at the base of Farewell Spit. This year, with the spring somewhat late, we hoped to clear up a couple of mysteries. Gael had always claimed there was a strange pink Caladenia there and three years ago we had found a few dead stalks of a rather woody Gastrodia at Christmas. We had also seen it at Totaranui. Subsequent visits had either been too early or too late to catch either in flower.

On the caladenias we were out of luck, they had aborted; so the pinkie will have to wait another year. There was no sign of the Corybas cheesemanii which had been very abundant, nor the Pterostylis alobula which can still be in flower at Christmas here, and plants of C. "pygmy" were hard to find compared with other years, but the woody Gastrodia was in flower and abundant. It had few flowers and careful examination of the column proved it to be Gastrodia minor (Photo right). One mystery cleared up.

To finish a brilliant fine day (the last for a while here we were to learn) we headed further out to seek Microtis parviflora and we were not disappointed. At the crossing track it was common, as before, along with M. unifolia.

From there, hopes of a few days in the Cobb or at Mt Arthur were foiled by the weather (and forecasts). We decided instead to head for the Lewis, but the rain did not lessen till we arrived at Hanmer. With a few hours of daylight to spare, we took the track up Dumblane on 28 Dec 03, a spot Graeme had often wanted to visit.

The shrubland at 1000m altitude was rather dry and uninteresting, so at the first opportunity we headed into a moist gully to a richer flora. There, amongst a good range of other species in flower Graeme spotted Corybas leaves in under tussock which in the past we had passed off as C. macranthus. Gael also happened to find a recently finished flower, which she exclaimed did not look like C. macranthus.

It had not long finished but the dorsal sepal seemed too long and broad.
After a few minutes active discussion, we decide to search the tussock and under shrubs in the hope of finding a fresher flower.

The macranthus-type leaves were quite abundant, but flowers few and all well over. About an hour later Gael struck gold (or was it red gold?). A patch of plants in a cooler, wet spot still in full flower. Now there was no doubt. It was not C. macranthus but a deep red C. trilobus type flower. Perhaps we should have been more suspicious. C. macranthus does occupy a wide range of often fertile or limey habitats. Yet it is a very high altitude to find C. macranthus and the lack of flowers is typical of C. trilobus. Furthermore C. trilobus extends right up to treeline (although often as an albino form in the south).

We are sure this species is much more widespread. We have seen similar leaves at Mt Eldrig (Fiordland), Freehold Stream (Ohau), Mt Newcombe (Arahura), Mt Haast (Lewis), the Cobb and quite a few other places throughout the Alps, but never seen flowers before. After quite a few photos, we selected two flowers to dispatch to Bruce Irwin as a belated Christmas present (illustrated by Bruce in J90 - Ed.)

Rain foiled a trip to L. Tennyson so we headed south to Craigieburn for a  few days and then having exhausted easy places to go, and exhausted likely spots for Pterostylis tanypoda on the limestone, we headed south to Mt Somers via the Lake Lyndon Road. As we got our first good views down the valley some interesting, open Dracophyllum scrub hailed from the roadside so we stopped to explore. It wasn't long before we found a Pterostylis in full flower (Photo right), but was it P. tanypoda or P. tristis? I have always been suspicious of records of P. tanypoda from Canterbury because we had often found green P. tristis, usually mixed with the typical reddish plants. But all these beasties were green.

After much peering and poking it was confirmed as P. tanypoda. The Cantabrians were right after all! Must be some of the most accessible plants we have found. In Nelson, they are usually high alpine on marble so this was a nice surprise.