Prickly Mingimingi

Leptecophylla juniperina ssp juniperina

This is the pricklier of the two plants known as mingimingi on Puangiangi. It’s slightly the worse hand-hold of the two, although you know you are in trouble anyway when you are happy with a mingimingi to hold on to. This one is very common and is usually a coloniser. The other one, Leucopogon fasciculatus, seems to be more a sub-canopy shrub in the drier parts of the forest on the island. Prickly mingimingi is common throughout the country.

A coloniser species, along with tauhinu behind it

It’s very attractive from a respectful distance, with the contrasting new foliage in spring and the (mainly) autumn fruits being the standouts.

New growth, November

The fruits come in different colours, although they are near enough the same on a given shrub. We can see white, pink and red fruits and the following photos are from shrubs within 10 metres of one another.

Immature fruits, November

(Part of an ongoing effort to photograph all the vascular plants on the island. Each species will get a page when I get enough reasonable photos.)

Three Days, One Late-flowering Manuka

Which insects visited the manuka I staked out this January? A macro video look at how these prosaic shrubs can be wonderful resources for small creatures that usually escape our notice.

For those interested the footage was taken at 4K 120 fps (which has a crop with my camera), handheld in natural light (too harsh and contrasty but I’m not a one-armed paperhanger). The camera has an APSC sensor, the lens is a Laowa 65 mm macro and the magnification varied between about 0.25X and 2X. The video was edited down from a couple of hours of raw footage, slowed down to 1/5 speed and stabilised in the video editor, which added a further mild crop.