Wheki
Common name: Rough tree fern
Botanical name: Dicksonia squarrosa
The wheki is a medium-sized tree fern with a slender caudex (trunk), slender stipes (frond stalks) and fronds that spread more or less horizontally. It characteristically grows in groves or colonies, sending out rhizomes from the root that form new trees up to a metre away from the parent and is the only type of tree fern in New Zealand that can have multiple trunks.
A wheki with 3 trunks
It is abundant in forests from sea level to 760 metres throughout the whole of New Zealand. It grows up to 6m tall and up to 15cm in diameter.
The typical ‘ponga’ logs that can be readily bought for landscaping purposes in garden centres are, in fact, not from the ponga at all, but are rather from the much more prolific wheki. (The ponga is the silver fern: see GC608W5 for the ponga cache in this series). Often when wheki logs are planted in the ground they will re-root and fresh fronds will sprout from the top, so that you can end up with a living fence. It is also common that a wheki log that is used as a garden edge, lying on its side, will sprout from one or more places along its length, giving rise in time to a small grove of wheki, albeit in a straight line.
Fronds
The fronds are stiff and harsh to touch, unlike the similar size katote, which has soft fronds that are a brighter green.
Two wheki with a katote in the foreground
The fronds are 1.2-2.4m long and 60-90 cm wide, dark green above and a paler green below. They are clothed in dark brown hairs.
Upper surface of part of a frond
Trunk
The trunk is a dark brown colour and holds onto its tan-coloured dead fronds for a long time before they break off, leaving the bases of the stalks after the fronds have fallen away.
Top of the trunk and base of fronds
The cache
The cache is not located at the given co-ordinates, but there is a colony of over a dozen wheki of varying sizes growing at this point, which is WP1. Standing on the boardwalk at WP1 you should be close to a small group of wheki that are very close together, within the space of a metre or so, containing at least two multi-trunked wheki. To locate the final you must:
1. Count the number of trunks in this close group that are still alive: i.e. those with green fronds growing out of the tops of the trunks (when I checked on 9/10/18 one of the original group seemed to have died, so I have altered the calculations to take this into account). This number is A in the following calculation.
2. The cache is located at the foot of another wheki at S 41 03.5BC E 175 11.4AA where B=A+4, C=A+6
The cache is a red M&M container and at time of placement contained a log sheet, a pencil and a monkey hand stamp. Online logs that do not have a matching signature in the paper log will be deleted.