Seeds of hope

A team of botanists is saving one of our most threatened orchids and reintroducing it into the wild.

- VERONIKA MEDUNA

New Zealand's native orchids are extraordinary plants and difficult to spot in the wild. But there are some rare species many might not even recognise as living things.

Cooper's black orchid is one of them. Classified as nationally critical and as rare as kākāpō, these orchids spend most of the year living underground in the form of a potato-like tuber, sprouting a stick of delicate, unassuming flowers only briefly during the height of summer.

Since Te Papa botany curator Carlos Lehnebach first identified this potato orchid in 2016, fewer than 250 adult plants have been found, limited to three sites across New Zealand. A pine forest in the Wairarapa is the only North Island site with a small remnant population. "There were fewer than 20 flowering plants at the site," Lehnebach says. "In the past two years, this number has fluctuated between 10 and only two."

The orchid is found nowhere else in the world. "Considering the amount of deforestation the Wairarapa Plains have been subjected to since people arrived in New Zealand, this orchid could well be the last surviving creature from the time of those pristine forests."