The New Zealand Plant Conservation Network

Hello again, so I was walking in the same area where I found the Pimelea orthia and came across this plant. Is it Pimelea? Is it a different form or P.orthia?(the leaves were double the size of P.orthia) or is it something else?

Any help is much appreciated.

This one too was growing in the shade and was up to a meter tall.

On the coastline behind Whakatane you will find P. orthia and P. tomentosa growing together and they do occasionally form hybrids - possibly this is what you have seen. From your images I can't easily tell - do you have any showing the whole plant?

That's about the only picture I got of the whole plant.

this one

Hi Hirere, that still looks like P. orthia to me. It can get up to c. 50cm tall and in shady sites like this one it will grow into a more open shape. if it is a hybrid with P. tomentosa I would expect the leaves to be more sharp pointed and obviously hairy.

Thank you for posting this.

To me this is not typical Pimelea orthia (see http://naturewatch.org.nz/observations/2491617 for the more usual species) and which can get up to 1 m tall. So based on these images I am very reluctant to say your observation is that species. The rounded leaves and hairy stems are not typical of P. orthia as I know it from the northern half of the North Island, and also from near Whakatane. So I don't really know what your plant is beyond suggesting it may be a hybrid (the hybrid with P. tomentosa looks rather like what you have observed - the hybrid Mike has hairy stems and broader often rounded leaves (in fact it looks superficially like your P. orthia subsp. protea except that its sterile).

Sorry I can't be more definitive

Another possibility is that your plant is part of the Pimelea prostrata complex - the late Colin Burrow's placed erect shrubs of Pimelea I had collected from the Mokohinau Islands in 1993 and which look very similar to your plant under Pimelea prostrata subsp. seismica (and I have seen similar upright shrubs of this form near Omamari, north of Daragville).My collections are not P. orthia but I still have issues that they are P. prostrata subsp. seismica - they fit there only because they have very hairy stems and glaucous rounded leaves. We need a modern DNA based revision of Pimelea to sort this out.

I have not seen that hybrid combination - I was basing my thoughts on what I would expect the hybrid to look like. Presumed crosses that I have seen between glabrous and hairy leaf species results in some hairs on the leaf of the offspring.

If you can get close-up photos of the top and bottom of the leaves Hirere that would help.

I agree that subsp. seismica is imperfectly circumscribed - as you say further work is needed, ideally supported with a genetics study.

Thanks Peter and Mike, I'll have to go back up and see if I can get a few better photos of it this weekend. I'm not too sure if I'll be able to capture good close ups of the leaves, what are you looking for on them Mike? The hair or lack of?

I'll just leave this Pimelea in the unknown folder for now :)