Finding Your Way Around the Garden

It's probable that some time in the future this section will be accessible only to people who are registered as friends of Te Māra Reo and have a password. Certainly, eventually all the various sections of the garden will be labelled on an aerial view like the one on the left. By moving your cursor over these areas and clicking when the little hand appears, you can see that section of the garden in more detail, with the location of the significant plants indicated and links to the appropriate pages in the language section. Note that the aerial photograph is now more than four years old, and, among other things, all the pine trees visible along the eastern and southern boundaries have been felled and removed.

For now , however, we will just list below the sections that we have had time to describe in enough detail, including directions about how to find each of them in relation to driveways, tracks, or other easily identifiable features of the landscape. We will progressively indicate the notional boundaries of the various sections for which pages have been completed. You will then be able to move your cursor over the photograph to the area you are interested in; a little hand will appear and a click will take you to that page. This will lag well behind the preparation of the pages about the plants and their names, however -- at least for the foreseeable future, but this could change if an enthusiastic volunteer appeared on the horizon!

The garden lies roughly east to west from the road to the river, so the left hand side of the photograph is the northern boundary and the right-hand one faces south. We have notionally divided the garden into a six major sectors, using the main driveway (visible in the photograph) as the East-West dividing line, extending the line notionally down to the river - Northwest, North Central, and Northeast, to the left as you go eastward from the river towards the road (i.e. from the bottom of the picture to the top), and to the right Southwest, South Central and Southeast. Within that there are various smaller notional divisions, marked by tracks, driveways, plantings etc. Fairly arbitrary, but it would help you find what you were looking for if you were here, and give you some idea of what's already been done and what is still in the planning stages if you are looking at this from afar.

As noted in the general introduction, guides to different stages in the history of the names, liked to the plants both in the garden and noted elsewhere on the site (e.g. "canoe" plants that were carried from place to place by Polynesians and their Austronesian forebears as they set out to colonize new lands), will be written in due course, with directions on how to find them -- these will be accessible through links embedded in the aerial photograph on the side panel on this page. These will be added to as time permits. The active links are also listed in the table at the bottom of this page.

IDENTIFICATION LABELS

Eventually, we hope that at least one example of all the plants with Polynesian heritage names, and some of those with more recent ones, will be identified with a sign. At present [late 2010], labels are confined mostly to the key plants in the "Time Travel" tour, which are marked with "name cylinders". However, an increasing number are being given "flag labels", colour coded for the historical period when the name (or a key component of it) is first known to have been used. For a description of these labels, click here.

LINKS TO SECTIONS MENTIONED IN THE NOTES ABOUT INDIVIDUAL PLANTS