2009 Aerial view of "Tumanako",
site of Te Māra Reo, looking east from the Waikato River.

德馨

January 2009 Aerial view of "Tumanako",
looking west towards the Waikato River.

One of the resident Pīwakawaka, perching briefly on a poroporo branch.

Te Māra Reo
The Language Garden

Te Māra Reo is a garden originally planned 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.

Both the garden and the web site are very much works in progress, although considerably more progress has been made on the website in recent years than on the garden. However, the whole property consisted of bare paddocks with a single oak tree and a phoenix palm in 1996, and now contains a miniature forest, so by that measure progress has been palpable over the years. The web site was launched on May 15, 2008, with about half a dozen pages. By August 2010 the half-way mark had been reached with both the living plants and the basic documentation about their descriptions and history. Progress since then has continued at a more leisurely pace, and many of the original pages have been considerably revised and expanded. For more information about the beginnings of the project, go to the "Garden" option on the "Whakapapa" menu.

You can navigate through the web site through the main menu on the header of this page (which will eventually appear on all pages as the existing ones are revised-- there were over 100 of those to start with, but most are now in the newer format). There are supplementary links to other parts of the site on most pages. Information about individual species and names can be found through the "index" menu. (If a link doesn't work or a picture seems to be missing from a page, please let us know: temaarareo at gmail.com.)

The header line at the top of each web page includes a small picture of one of our resident tui (on pages like this one, with the menu incorporated in the header), or pīwakawaka (fantails, Rhipidura fulginosa, on the pages prepared before August 2010 and not yet reformatted). Both are friendly, talkative birds who were here to greet the first human arrivals. (In case you didn't notice, there is also a pīwakawaka on this page, below the aerial photos of the garden.) The footer contains a picture of the flower of the hue (calabash gourd, Lagenaria siceraria), a plant that was brought here by the first East Polynesian settlers and still grows excellently in our garden. Clicking on these images will return you to this "home" page. (I was very pleased to see that, despite the less favourable climate, our hue plants looked much more vigorous and happy than their Hawaiian counterparts that I encountered when I was in Hawaii in 2007, although I noticed some more worthy specimens there in the garden at the 'Imiloa Center on the Big Island in 2010).

Clicking on any of those header or footer images on another page will bring you back to this one. There is also a "Creative Commons" copyright notice at the foot of each page which grants permission for non-commercial use of any original material on this site provided that its source is acknowledged.

You can visit the garden in cyberspace through the "Hōparatanga" menu. Unfortunately, the garden is closed to real-life visits at present, but you can contact us by email: temaarareo at gmail.com.

A WORD ABOUT FONTS

After November 2010 these pages have had Geneva, Arial, and Helvetica sans serif fonts (in that order) as the default fonts. This enables us to use characters with in-built macrons which should display properly on any computer. In the few remaining older pages, the fonts used are mostly Arial Māori and Times New Roman Māori. These will display the macron if you have those fonts installed on your computer. Otherwise, the macron will appear as an umlaut diacritic (two little dots above the vowel character). If you have the Mäori fonts installed, the macrons on both sets of pages will be displayed correctly. If you don't, the word "Māori" in the previous sentence will look like this: "Mäori".

ASSOCIATED SITES

Several formerly separate sites have been brought under the umbrella of Te Māra Reo, and can be accessed through the Tumanako URL. These are Te Papakupu o te Taitokerau (Taitokerau Māori Dictionary), ICEL 2000 (the 2000 conference of the International Consortium for Experiential Learning), Te Wahapū (material from the pioneering Te Wahapū CBCS 1991-97, with some more recent files), and Rakiora, some archival files on research conducted under the aegis of the James Henare Māori Research Centre, University of Auckland, 1997-2003).