Kawakawa

I finally have my first plant in my little greenhouse! It's a kawakawa, from one of my officemates. Also known as Macropiper excelsum, it's a Maori medicinal plant. It's leaves are made into a tea or chewed as an anti-inflammatory. Kawakawa are all over the forest understory here. I chewed a leaf during my training at the sanctuary and my mouth did feel a little numb after...

It's a plant with an interesting natural history. There are small holes in nearly every leaf from a grazing caterpillar (the looper caterpillar), but there are usually no leaves fully eaten because as the plant is eaten it releases a toxin that causes the caterpillars to drop off and move on to another plant.

Wohoo! I can't wait to get my little native garden up and going, with pots of all sorts of cute little green locals. Perhaps eventually I'll even have some very non-native tomatoes.