Nau mai ki Te Māra Reo
He wāhi iti o ngā māra o Tāne, o Haumia, o Te Hāpuku*

Te Māra Reo is a garden being developed to include examples of as many as possible of the New Zealand native plants which bear names brought to Aotearoa by the first Polynesian settlers and explorers, and a web site devoted to providing information about the plants and also about the history of each name. The exigencies of time and money, especially the latter, have slowed the development of the organic garden, but development of the website continues, even though progress since its launch in May 2008 has at times been reminiscent of a vehicle caught in traffic on the Auckland motorway at rush hour.

Visit the NEWS page to see what has happened since your last visit!
(last updated 29 March 2024)

You can explore this website through the drop-down menus on the page header:

The INDEX OF NAMES will take you to a list of inherited plant names, with links to the pages illustrating and discussing them -- 239 at last count, with a lot more to come;

The ORIGINS options will let you read about the history of the garden, and also about the history of the plant names, with a page devoted to the oldest names to have arrived in Aotearoa.

There is a GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE GARDEN AND THE SITE linked to this page (it was the home page until March 2015, but we decided that it had too much detail so substituted this simpler page instead).

The other pull-down options are self-explanatory.

Right now, by clicking on the picture below, you can begin a 5,000 year, 10,000+ kilometre journey from Taiwan, through the Philippines, out into the Central Pacific to tropical Polynesia and on to Aotearoa:

Or click on the characters to learn a little about the philosophy behind the garden:

德馨

*[In many Māori cosmological traditions, Tāne, a child of Rangi the Sky-Father and Papa, the Earth-Mother, is responsible directly or indirectly (through his offspring) for creating most trees and plants. However his brother Haumia is the origin of wild foods, and the scaly tree ferns, "the fish of the forest", are the children Te Hāpuku, whose father Tangaroa, god of the sea, is another of Tāne's brothers.]