In 2024, Dr Christopher Havran of Campbell University in North Carolina travelled to Hawaii researching an American botanist — Marie Neal — because of her early work on the flora of Hawaii. He was not expecting to find around 1000 specimens collected by her in a 1920s visit to New Zealand and so contacted botanists and archives here.
Notes taken by Neal tell of her travels in 1925, with visits to Nelson, Glenorchy and Dunedin.
Neal explored a wide range of wild habitats. She also visited the gardens of local botanists and the Dunedin Botanic Garden, which enabled her to collect a wider range of plant specimens.
On arriving in Dunedin, Neal would have seen preparations in full swing for the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition.
Neal certainly did not let the exhibition get in her way, travelling widely around Dunedin — everywhere from Blackhead to the Spit, from Saddle Hill to Sandymount, Mihiwaka to Tomahawk.
She collected from along tram lines, bush tracks, gullies and hilltops. It would seem likely that she had field assistance, but the only leads so far are that Rev Dr Holloway gave her access to the university botany laboratory and also that she left some herbarium specimens with local botanist Earle Northcroft.
What is curious from a Botanic Garden view is that this visit predates our digitised garden records, which currently only reach back as far as 1977.
We have a border checklist of native plants from the 1920s and it seems there is a good match with those seen by Neal. Some plants are well-known parts of the garden, such as the Veronica (Hebe) border, but there are also Celmisia which may have been from collections by David Tannock leading up to the exhibition, along with wild species like the mistletoe — Korthalsella lindsayi. These are plants that can still be seen in the botanic garden today.
