What Plant is This?
Signs and Labels

Introduction

A key element in any botanical garden is signage that clearly identifies the various plants, or at least enough of them so that you can know which plant is which. I have often been irritated by signage even in very respectable gardens, because it is difficult to read, or because if you don't know anything about the plant it identifies, it is highly ambiguous because there are several quite different plants to which the sign could relate.

We are making 2010 the "year of the signs", and I hope that by the time the year is out, at least one example of each species with a Polynesian heritage name, and some others, will be unambiguously identified with a "flag label", and the "iconic examples" of different eras, or plants of special importance, will have a "name cylinder" associated with them. All of these labels are attached to or sit on top of black bamboo poles. The black bamboo (Phyllostachys nigra) is very durable in the ground, a renewable resource which is plentiful in our environment, and just ideal for this purpose. The cylinders are made of moso bamboo (Phyllostachys edulis), a very much larger bamboo which also luxuriates here. Both grow abundantly in Taiwan, the island from where the Austronesians set forth to explore the furthest reaches of the Pacific Ocean. Many Austronesian societies used bamboo cylinders as the medium for written messages, so we thought that this was a particularly appropriate form of signage (however, our labels are made of laminated paper fixed to the cylinder with transparent duct tape, rather than incised on the bamboo with sylabic characters!). The signs for the key "Time Travel" plants are already in place.

The galleries below illustrate the signs and the information they contain.

The cylinder signs show the reconstructed Proto-Polynesian (or oldest Eastern Polynesian) name of the plant, and the Modern Mäori name derived from or incorporating this, in very large letters, followed by some other information in smaller type. The supplementary information includes other names for the plant, if any; the oldest forms of the inherited name and the scientific names of the plants they referred to; and, where needed, very brief notes about the name itself, or the significance of the plant. Those printed on a white background are for plants included in the "time travel" walk; those for other "iconic" plants are colour coded like the flag signs (see next paragraph).

The flag signs have colour-coded backgrounds -- gold for names of Proto Austronesian or Proto Malayo-Polynesian origin [Stages 1 & 2], green for Proto Oceanic and Proto Eastern Oceanic [Stages 3 & 4], sand-coloured for the Fijian and Western Polynesian-based stages [5-8], and blue for the Eastern Polynesian stages [9-12]. There will also be a few white flags, for names originating in Aotearoa. (Yes, there is some hidden symbolism -- gold for the sunrise and sunset as the Austronesian migrations begin in Taiwan and then begin a new phase of discovery as some of the descendents of the first waves of voyagers leave their new home-base in the Philippines for other lands to the east and the west, green for the forests of northern New Guinea, the Solomons and Vanuatu, sand for the beaches of the islands of the Western Pacific, blue for the huge ocean voyages required to settle Eastern Polynesia, and white for the cloud which enveloped Aotearoa and the long daylight of the summers when the Polynesian explorers and settlers first arrived.)

These flag signs, as you can see in the example, have the scientific name, alternative names (if any), and the whakapapa of the inherited name, with some additional notes, on one side, and the related names in modern Polynesian languages (and the botanical names of the plants which each of these designates), along with further supplementary information, on the other. We are just developing these "flags" now (mid-March 2010); when there are enough flying to make a pretty picture, we'll add a photograph of the scene to the gallery! Meanwhile, a completed prototype is here as a stand-in.

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