Harakeke: A story of New Zealand flax and its cultural meaning

The following is an edited extract from Aotearoa in Bloom by Rachel Clare and Tryphena Cracknell

Oh to be told by an admirer that you’re ‘me te wai kōrari’ (like the nectar of a harakeke flower). If you’ve never supped from a harakeke blossom in spring, you are in for a sweet treat. For a larger drink, you might like to wait until high tide. In Tail of the Fish: Maori Memories of the Far North Te Aupōuri author Matire Kereama recalled highlights of her childhood in the late 1800s, swinging across ravines on rātā vines, sliding down sand dunes on flat pieces of rimuwhanui, a type of seaweed, and sucking the nectar, known as wai kōrari, from harakeke flowers: ‘Along the edges of the stream rows and rows of flax grew. Those flax blooms were always full of sweet nectar at high tide. Why at high tide we never really knew. But along the edges of the stream we would run, pulling at the tall flower heads and sucking up the sweet nectar before the tūī birds got it. It was great fun joining in with the birds which seemed to be much tamer than they are now. Would you like to taste that sweet juice? Well, the wild flax is still there for the taking.’

This relationship between tide and nectar was also described in Rod McDonald’s book Te Hekenga: Early Days in the Horowhenua, ‘[a] curious thing about the flower of the flax is that the State of the tide can be told from them with considerable exactitude. I will not guarantee that this holds good everywhere, but on the coastal country I can vouch for the correctness of the Statement from personal observation. At low tide the flower is empty, and, as the tide comes in, so the wai korari gradually rises in the flower, until at high tide it is full to the brim, and at spring-tide actually flows over in a steady drip. As the tide goes out the wai korari recedes until the flower is dry again.’

Māori extracted wai kōrari by patiently tapping the flowers against the inside of a hue gourd and this was drunk on its own or with water. In Te Waipounamu South Island, it was mixed with a ‘sago’, extracted tī kōuka cabbage trees. The delicious nectar was also used to sweeten bracken ferns and other types of foods.

While you’re most likely to spot tūī and korimako bellbirds drinking from harakeke flowers, the nectar is also drunk by tīeke saddlebacks, geckos, pekapeka short-tailed bats and several insects, including our native bees.

The introduced honeybee Apis mellifera has a short proboscis and isn’t always able to reach the nectar on all our native flowers. But harakeke willingly obliges, and our smaller native bees are often left hovering on the sidelines awaiting their turn. Harakeke pollen has high protein levels, making it a star plant for bees, as pollen is used for feeding larvae. Honeybees mix it with nectar and stash it in their pollen baskets, whereas native Leioproctus and Lasioglossum species pack it onto their back legs. The masked bee (Hylaeus species) eats it, then regurgitates it for feeding to its larvae.

I will provide

Harakeke grows throughout Aotearoa in a diverse range of conditions to 1300m above sea level. You’ll see it at the beach, the awa, growing beside swamps and flicking its sword-like leaves around on cliffs. It’s a tough plant that can cope with pretty much anything: wild winds, floods and droughts and – added bonus – possums and rabbits won’t eat it.

Phormium tenax, grows from 1m to 5m high. Wharariki (P. cookianum), also known as mountain flax because it grows on rocky outcrops and cliff faces, has been divided into two subspecies: P. cookianum subsp. hookeri grows throughout Aotearoa. P. cookianum subsp. cookianum, which has shorter, fatter leaves with a dark outline, are more likely encountered in subalpine areas of Te Waipounamu South Island. It grows to 2m and has pendulous twisted seed-heads compared to P. tenax, which stand upright on the flower stalk. The leaves are softer, less fibrous and have a drooping form which makes them less useful for weaving. Its flowers are greeny-yellow compared to the dark red of P. tenax.

The importance of harakeke to life in Aotearoa cannot be underestimated. Botanist William Colenso recalled: ‘On my arrival in this country the Maoris… would often inquire after the vegetable productions of England; and nothing astonished them more than to be told there was no harakeke growing there. On more than one occasion I have heard chiefs say, “How is it possible to live there without it?” and “I would not dwell in such a land as that.”’

Leaves were utilised for countless domestic purposes – mats, fishing nets, sails, ropes, kākahu clothes, sandals and kete for every purpose. Say the right karakia, you might even be able to weave magical ropes to capture the sun, as Māui did when he got fed up with Tama-nui-te-rā moving across the sky too quickly. The kōrari flower stalks were also utilised, lashed with harakeke twine to make a mōkihi river raft or for a flaming torch to guide your way…

Muka, a fine white thread-like fibre, was extracted to make kākahu and for sewing. Botanist Joseph Banks, who sailed on the Endeavour with James Cook in 1769–70, described how it shone like silk and marvelled at the intricacy of hand weaving.

Harakeke was also an important rongoā plant that was used to treat a suite of health issues. Constipated? Try a tonic made from the boiled base of the leaf and the rhizomes. Boils or abscesses? Make a mashed poultice made from the leaf butt and rhizomes. Wounds were bandaged with soft fibrous leaves, bones could be mended with splints made with stronger leaves or flower stems. Burns and wounds were treated with the gum, which has antiseptic qualities. Muka was used to stitch wounds and tie umbilical cords. Today it is still used in modern rongoā rākau as well as skincare products.

There was a roaring trade in harakeke from the 1860s, and it was used for ropes, underlay and matting. Leaves, harvested en masse and sent to flax mills where they were stripped by machines that extracted the muka. Bales were exported overseas and used to make ropes. By the 1870s there were around 161 mills. At the peak of production, 32,000 tonnes were processed for export in 1916. The work was backbreaking and dangerous, with the risk of fire or being caught in machines. Although the 1930s Depression mostly collapsed the industry, there were still 14 mills running in the 1960s. The last closed in 1985.

Weaving together a special collection

In the 1950s, Pākehā woman Rene Orchiston started collecting cultivars with different desirable properties, such as durability, length, softness or colour, after noticing that many of them were no longer being propagated. Over the years, Orchiston educated herself on the different cultivars and their names, by talking to weavers and visiting marae. She often traded honey, fruit or another harakeke cultivar for new plants, testing their suitability and qualities for different types of weaving. For example, varieties with black edges, such as ‘Kōhunga’, ‘Taeore’ and ‘Tapamangu’, are better for muka, but orange-edged varieties such as ‘Arawa’, gathered from the Rotoiti area near Rotorua, are best for stripping with a shell and making piupiu, due to their length.

“If you pluck out the heart of the flax bush, where will the bellbird sing?” – Meri NgĀroto

In 1987 Orchiston gifted her collection of 50 cultivars to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research for the purposes of creating a national collection. It’s now looked after by Crown research institute Maanaki Whenua – Landcare Research with sites around the country, including at marae and educational institutions.

Growing the whānau

‘Unuhia te rito o te pū harakeke, kei hea te korimako tangi ai?’ (If you pluck out the heart of the flax bush, where will the bellbird sing?). This whakataukī by Meri Ngāroto of Te Aupouri affirms that ‘he tangata, he tangata, he tangata’ (the people, the people, the people) and nurturing future generations are the most important thing in the world.

To Māori, a harakeke plant is a whānau. The rito inner shoot is a child and should never be removed. The awhi rito on either side are the mātua parents and are not harvested either. Only the outer leaves, which represent extended family members or grandparents, can be harvested. A pā harakeke plantation of is a metaphor to describe extended whānau or hapū.

There are special tikanga around the planting and harvest of harakeke. Plants are never harvested at night, during wet weather or if the harvester is menstruating. A karakia is always said to acknowledge the whakapapa of the harakeke and seek protection for the weavers.

In the garden

Our Phormium species are BFF garden plants because they can cope with most situations, from light sandy soils to heavy clay. They’ll stabilise banks and are ideal mass planted as wind shelters. Their sculptural form complements other plant shapes, and when they bloom, the nectar eaters will visit your garden.
You can grow harakeke from seed, but if you want to replicate the properties of a parent plant, remove and replant a fan with some root material attached. Local cultivars from eco-sourced seed are best for revegetation projects. The seed is easy to harvest from the dry seed-heads in late summer/early autumn, and germinates easily.

A wide range of commercially grown cultivars are available, in shades of yellows, pinks and browns or dressed in bright stripes. Platt’s Black is a bronze- and purple-leaved plant that is a striking foil to other garden plants like pink roses or salvias, while Yellow Wave looks like a golden-green fountain. If you are looking for something smaller, there are dwarf cultivars, bred from the more compact wharariki (P. cookianum), in a range of colours, which grow to about half a metre. Grow harakeke in a sunny spot.

What’s in a name?

Harakeke and wharariki are the only species in the genus Phormium, which belong to the subfamily Hemerocallidaceae, so they’re a type of lily and are related to the brightly coloured hemerocallis, aka daylilies.

Phormium comes from the ancient Greek for basket, while tenax is Latin for holding fast, tenacious. Cookianum refers to James Cook, as plants of both species were collected and named by the German naturalist father and son Johann Reinhold and Georg Forster on Cook’s second expedition to Aotearoa. Hookeri refers to Joseph Hooker, director of Kew Gardens in the 19th century, who wrote about New Zealand plants.

European traders named the plant flax because they thought the fibres were similar to the unrelated European flax, Linum usitatissimum, which has been used to make linen products in Europe for centuries.

Etymological studies suggest that hara in harakeke may derive from the Austronesian word paŋudaN, which relates to pandanus plants, which also have strappy leaves and are used for weaving. Pandanus species are variously called fala in Samoa, ‘ara in Raratonga and hala in Hawai‘i. It’s probable that whara in wharariki, for P. cookianum, has the same origins. Riki means little, referring to this plant being the smaller species. Harakeke is also known as kōrari, after its flower stalk, as well as harareka, kohungaita and tīhore.

Aotearoa in Bloom by Rachel Clare and Tryphena Cracknell is available to buy at HarperCollins New Zealand.

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