These days, Dr Lord is a senior lecturer in the University of Otago botany department.
But back in the late 1980s she was completing a BSc (Hons) degree in plant and microbial sciences at the University of Canterbury and later starting work on a Canterbury PhD.
During extensive fieldwork at Arthurs Pass she dreamed of having some kind of push-button machine which a researcher could point at a hard-to-recognise native plant and gain a quick identification.
That dream is now becoming reality, thanks to the development of Flora Finder, a smartphone app developed by Otago University and MEA Mobile, which will quickly identify 87 of the country's most common native trees and shrubs.
''I'm excited. I can't wait to add more to the 87 [plants],'' she said.
''This is a fun, easy to use app for tourists, trampers and casual walkers.''
New Zealand has about 2500 vascular native plants - not counting mosses and lichens - but including 530 native trees and shrubs.
There were many native plants, books on the country's flora were ''cumbersome and expensive'', and the terminology and Latin names involved were ''daunting, even for an expert'', she said.
The app could help many ''citizen scientists'' provide valuable information to conservation and management authorities about both rare and prized plants and the presence of damaging weeds.
The rarest plant identified on the app was a heart-leaf kohuhu, a greyish bush which stands up to 3m high, but which has tiny, heart-shaped leaves.
This plant was rare in Otago. For example, only four plants had been officially identified in the Catlins area, she said.
Dr Graham Strong, commercialisation manager at Otago Innovation, the university's commercialisation arm, said the app would make the identification of New Zealand's unique native flora much easier.
And GPS was used to show exactly where a plant had been spotted.
The app had also been set up so that an image of a leaf, which the user had been unable to identify, would be sent to the Otago University botany department, where a specialist would identify it, he said.
