One of the comments to this blog recommended that we visit the Akoroa Peninsula if we were in Christchurch. It looks very interesting, and we were sorely tempted, but in the end we decided against driving today. We had a four and a half hour drive yesterday, and another four hour drive tomorrow, so we opted to let the car sit today. But it is definitely on my list for our next visit to Christchurch, though we will need to stay more than two nights. That seems to be a theme for our next trip here.

Christchurch is known as a garden city. There is a large park and botanical garden a short walk from our hotel. We also have an arboretum in Ottawa, but you know … winter…? Anyway, it was a beautiful sunny day, perfect for shorts and cool linen dresses. So we applied sunscreen, put on our sun hats and headed out for a walk.

It’s a summer Sunday afternoon here, so the locals were out in force, along with the tourists. But the park is big enough that it was never overly crowded. It was lovely and cool.

As you know, I love unusual vegetation pictures, like this one of a large fungus beside a tree stump. Abstract art!

The botanical garden had a section devoted to native New Zealand vegetation. We love how different it is from anything we see at home. For this next picture, Jan is in the frame to give you a sense of scale.

But I also wanted to zoom in on the branches of the tree. It is a jumble of branches going every which way – total beautiful chaos.

And then, when we looked at the trunk, we saw this. I suspect it is a parasitic plant, but it looks like something out or Tolkien, which seems appropriate for New Zealand.

And of course, lots of birds, some native, and some introduced.

One of the things we’ve been doing on this trip is trying to spot the Manuka trees. Here is what the leaves look like.

We know it was a Manuka tree because it had a sign, telling us what it was.

We love nature, but for us, this is the best way to observe nature – with gravel paths and small plaques identifying the species. I may have grown up on the farm, but by now I’m definitely a city mouse.

One of the benefits of walking through a botanical garden is that you learn all sorts of interesting (at least to us) details about plants. It is basically a museum that is outdoors. One section of the garden had a number of different species of Veronica. They all came from the same original seed, but have changed to adapt to the many different climate niches in New Zealand. One of these was called The Remarkables, because it is adapted to live in harsh alpine conditions. We visited The Remarkables just last week, so this was cool.

Here is a sampling of some of the other plants we saw today.

And here is another of those amazing New Zealand trees.

I’ll close with this picture. It was taken from a quiet spot in the botanical garden where we rested on a bench, in the shade, overlooking the Avon.