"Of shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings..."

Well, almost. We can't claim all of the many odd things that "the time has come to speak of" according to the Walrus in Lewis Carrol's poem, but our day did include ships and cabbages and kings, anyway.

In the morning we had the privilege of being guided on a tour of the Otari Native Bush Reserve by Olaf, a friend of native plant growers Arnold and Ruth Dench, whom I mentioned in a previous post. Olaf, now 81, has devoted much of his colourful life to the preservation of NZ native plants, and proved a fount of fascinating information. During our walk through this beautiful place, Olaf showed us the world's smallest pine (Frank is examining it below); a shrub that uses its sticky leaves to trap and kill small birds to nourish it (eek!); a stinging nettle whose sting can kill a small child (we gave this one a wide berth); an rare view of the kaleidoscopic symmetry of tree ferns from above, via the elevated boardwalk (see below); a lancewood, whose strange downward-pointing leaves resemble Maori lances (see below); a plant from the Three Kings Island named after one of the Biblical three wise men/kings (Melchior); and some gorgeously colourful new hybrid flax (phormium) plants being created for the garden market here (see below). There was also a whole garden of New Zealand cabbage trees. My head was spinning with new names and images by the end of the two hours--quite a challenge to try to learn a whole new range of plants. I was pathetically grateful when I recognized something such as a maidenhair fern!

After lunch in Wellington we had a very useful meeting with two gentlemen at the Institutes of Technology and Polytechnic Association, who look after quality control in the colleges here. We learned a number of things of interest to Ontario, where we are just beginning to implement similar processes.

Duty done, however, we strolled down to the harbour to have a look at the ships which have just arrived on this leg of the Volvo Ocean Race. This race will keep the crews at sea for over a year and goes from Spain, around the world and back to Germany. There are several NZ ships in the race (one is currently in the point lead), and also one sponsored by Disney, "The Black Pearl" (from Pirates of the Caribbean). The ship that won this leg of the race beat the next ship by a mere 9 seconds over a 1500k.distance! The ships are certainly lovely (see below) and we enjoyed the colourful harbour scene. Just as we were preparing to leave, several sculling teams practicing in the harbour sent up a shout and our attention was attracted to three dolphins playing around their boats. I'm not sure if you can see the dolphin fin in the shot below--they surfaced only briefly--but it was a delightful end to our day.