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A warming sight. Looking across Island Bay and behind Taputeranga, the golden evening glow of sunset lights up the cloudy sky and the lower hills of the Orongorongos - the southern end of the Rimutaka Range.
The hills face towards the setting sun. The colour on the hills intensifies as the sun goes down but the island Taputeranga, in the shade of a headland, misses out on the gilding.
Animal, vegetable or mineral?
Actually it is a plant - Muehlenbeckia astonii - apparently also known as shrubby tororaro, though I haven't ever heard it called that. It is unusual for a New Zealand native plant in being deciduous. It's another tough coastal plant, and is a great little windbreak in my garden.
In winter it looks like a tangle of coppery reddish wires, with the widely spaced branchlets firing off in all directions together making a curious mound that doesn't look much like a living thing.
However, in spring and summer it does have tiny bright green leaves and little white flowers and fruits. It doesn't look much less odd, but it does look alive. There is a fantastical quality to quite a few of our native plants, a happy reminder of the great diversity in the forms and adaptations of living things.
Dense storm clouds over Island Bay create deep blue shadows, the island Taputeranga in the foreground, the light breaking through over the lighthouse on distant Baring Head.
Lyall Bay is a long sandy beach hemmed in by human constructions - at one end the airport, along its length a concrete wall which contains the sand dunes and separates them from the footpath and busy road, and at the far end some houses built almost on the rocky shore. Of course, the concrete wall doesn't contain the sand, which is blown in flurries up the roads when the southerly wind is in force.
Attempts to anchor and protect the dunes have been made - they are roped off and little signs tell us to use designated walkways to get on to the beach, in an attempt to protect the dunes and the grasses - especially the pingao, a golden-coloured native sand sedge which has been fostered along the coast in more recent years. These roped-in areas are usually well clear of high tide, but the southerly swell has been washing right up to the dunes, no respecter of the barrier.
When I took this photograph the wind was still strong - you get some idea of it from the flattening of the grasses and the way they point away from the prevailing wind. It was already evident that the contours of the beach were changing - as they often do with the dynamic weather the beach is exposed to - with a hollowing out near the usual water line and a heaping of sand up around the posts and ropes.
But after the winds lessened and the sea subsided somewhat, the damage was much more evident:
"Save our dunes" indeed - sand and seaweed washed up around the post, scouring and erosion within the protected area.
The long roots of the pingao, which help to secure the dunes, now exposed and vulnerable.
The harsh bright sunlight reveals the extent of the erosion, not only care of the storm but also because intrepid people out walking on the beach, despite the storm, dodged the waves by clambering over the already battered dunes. We, too, are forces of nature!
Backlighting by the winter sun (just as it sounds, illumination of something from behind) outlines the rich greens and the veining of Taupata leaves. Taupata (Coprosma repens) is a tough New Zealand native shrub/small tree found in coastal areas. Its leaves are so glossy that it is also called the mirror plant.
While the backlighting doesn't show the glistening leaf surface, it does show the liveliness of a plant that seems happy in really difficult situations - a bit of a tonic on a grey winter's day.
The storm front fluctuates in intensity, and the waves continue to pound in. The power of the southerly swell is revealed by the amount of debris dumped over the road and footpath along the south coast between Island Bay and Owhiro Bay. Traffic was disrupted, but City Council workers quickly cleared the road of the kelp and other seaweed, driftwood and rocks.
The debris being cleared.
The culprits - looking quite innocent really. And a glimpse of snow covered mountains across the Cook Strait in the South Island.
Brrrr... southerly storms again. The air temperature is not so bad - but the biting wind isn't fun. Big swells have been pounding in - rolling and cresting and foaming - but it's so difficult to convey their beauty and power in photographs. Sometimes an adventurous person will be on the rocks, giving scale - but in midwinter who would want to risk getting drenched by the spray, or even swept off their feet? Just imagine a constant low rumble from the waves, having to hold your body upright against the pushing and pulling of the wind, your glasses fogging up with salt spray, and the waves always being at their most photogenic when you are focusing your camera somewhere else. But in the late afternoon there was a period when the winds eased. People were admiring the sight of the waves rolling in and a brave person scaled the rocks - which are larger than you might think - to give some idea of the scale. Thank you!
Rocks by Princess Bay, waves and seaspray of the southerly swell, a person clambering on the rocks giving a sense of scale and Taputeranga, the island of Island Bay, in the background.
To give you some idea of the beauty of the waves as they roll in to Houghton Bay (which is just beyond Princess Bay and is, in calmer times, used for surfing by the brave.) The dense salt spray drifts inland a long way and mists everything. That salty taste!
The south coast is fringed by steep slopes - would they qualify to be called cliffs? Houses tend to be built along the bottom, close to water's edge, or perched on the tops, catching the views and the wind. Generally it's too steep to build in between, and the plants growing there secure the sometimes slippery slopes.
Owhiro Bay - distribution of houses.
The vegetation covering these slopes is like a lumpy blanket of plants which mould to the contours of the hill, sculpted by the wind, protected from damage by their low profile. Desiccation is limited by their grey or small or strappy leaves. By hugging the slopes and huddling together these tough plants create microclimates which shelter less tough plants. This slope, by Owhiro Bay, has a collection which includes NZ flax, gorse, pittosporums, ngaio, cordylines, coprosmas, artemisias, and a wiry mounding plant which I haven't yet identified - there are quite a few native plants like this, an intriguing group. Golden flowered gorse, a pestiferous introduced weed in other parts of the country, here acts as a "nursery plant" providing the conditions for seedlings of native plants to grow.
Plants on the slopes by the coast at Owhiro Bay.
Note the ubiquitous seagulls - it is difficult to get a photo around here without one intruding, and especially in evening shots distant seagulls often speckle my images like sensor dust! But they surely qualify as toughies, real survivors.
If you are a plant and you are living along the south coast here, you are resilient and tenacious, or have lucked into a sheltered and auspicious spot. Salt spray and battering winds cause physical harm and desiccation and the rocky shore and cliffs offer very little soil to anchor your roots. Nevertheless, many plants survive and some even flourish. Plants have evolved a variety of tactics to manage this feat - for example having leaf structures which reduce water loss from transpiration. The long thin leaves of grasses growing along the sandy dunes bend with the wind and limit dehydration. Their deep roots hold on to the sand and have the effect of stabilising the dunes. I think that these very functional plants also look very fetching outlined by the golden light of the late afternoon.
High tide at Lyall Bay, late afternoon - grasses holding the dunes.
Living in Wellington, especially by the coast, has made me much more aware of the wind - a feature of this location - and the rapidly changing cloudscapes that result. Wonderful clouds can mean gorgeous skies as the sun rises and sets. Some people are a bit churlish about photographs of sunrise and sunset, regarding them as tired cliches. But I keep being entranced by the transient beauty created by the clouds and light, and unapologetically offer you this image - the first of many, I am sure.
Tranquil (to my eyes) and dramatic - soft pink sunrise over Taputeranga and Island Bay
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