A small museum in Nelson has become the unlikely home of what is believed to be the world’s first exhibition devoted entirely to the mountain daisy, the hardy alpine plant that southern Māori turned into one of the most prized weaving fibres in the country.
The exhibition, called Taku Rau Tīkumu, has been drawing visitors to the Nelson Provincial Museum on Trafalgar Street since it opened in April, and it runs through the winter until early August before it begins a tour of the country. It tells the story of tīkumu, the name given to the large-leaved mountain daisy and to the soft fibre weavers draw from its leaves, and the deep relationship between people and the high country of the South Island.
Tīkumu belongs to the genus Celmisia, a sprawling family of around 70 daisy species, more than 60 of which grow nowhere else on Earth. They are a familiar sight to anyone who has tramped above the bushline, carpeting the mountain grasslands and herbfields of the South Island and throwing up solitary white flowers from December onwards. The species at the heart of the exhibition, Celmisia semicordata, is among the largest of them all.
“Tikumu is one of our largest Celmisia and grows widely and abundantly throughout Te Waipounamu,” botanist Shannel Courtney told the museum, using the Māori name for the South Island.
What makes the plant remarkable is not the flower but the underside of its thick leaves. There the daisy carries a felty white layer that weavers peel away from the green outer casing. The fibre is warm and soft, it sheds water, and unlike harakeke flax it can be worked straight away without drying. Those qualities made it a treasure for kairaranga, the weavers who once climbed high into the ranges to gather it.
The exhibition has been researched and curated over several years by Hamuera and Naomi Aporo-Manihera, after what the couple have described as a series of chance encounters with the plant and its history. Hamuera Manihera also looks after the museum’s Māori collection as its Kaitiaki Taonga Māori, the role responsible for the care of cultural treasures.
Gathering tīkumu was never easy work, and it still is not. The plant grows only in the alpine zone, well above the comfort of the valley floors, which means a harvest begins with a serious climb. “You really have to travel, hike some pretty impressive ara, pathways,” Hamuera told RNZ, describing the effort it takes to reach the daisy fields. That difficulty is part of the reason the fibre was held in such high regard. For centuries iwi Māori ranked cloaks made with tīkumu alongside the highest symbols of chiefly status.
It is also part of the reason the knowledge of how to work it very nearly vanished. As old harvesting routes fell out of use and the weaving tradition narrowed, the tikanga, or correct practice, surrounding tīkumu came close to being lost altogether. Much of the exhibition is given over to the way that knowledge is now being rebuilt, particularly among Ngāi Tahu weavers in the south, who are once again climbing to gather leaves and passing the technique to a new generation.
The museum has been able to anchor that revival in some extraordinary objects. Among them are prepared tīkumu leaves from Puketoi Station in Central Otago that are thought to be around 300 years old, rolled and pressed and set aside, most likely, for a kahu tīkumu, a cloak made from the daisy fibre. The bundle was later collected by the early Nelson naturalist Frederick Vincent Knapp and has survived in the museum’s care, a rare physical link to weavers working long before Europeans arrived. Alongside the historic material the museum has gathered contemporary samples from a local weaver, ranging from botanical specimens of the living plant to fibre prepared and ready for the loom.
Finished cloaks made from the daisy are almost impossible to find. The curators point to a single surviving example with a tīkumu underside held at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London, which has been described as the only one of its kind identified anywhere in the world. That scarcity is exactly what gives the Nelson show its weight. It is less a display of finished garments than an attempt to put a whole body of environmental and cultural knowledge back within reach.
The exhibition was first reported by Scoop and Te Ao Māori News when it opened in April, and the museum says interest has been strong enough that the show will not stay in Nelson. After it closes it is due to travel to the Tūhura Otago Museum in Dunedin later this year, with possible further stops in Christchurch and Taranaki, carrying the story of the mountain daisy well beyond the ranges where it grows.
For visitors who will never make the climb themselves, it is a rare chance to see how a plant most people walk straight past became, in the right hands, a treasure worth scaling a mountain for.
Have you seen the Taku Rau Tīkumu exhibition, or do you have a connection to traditional weaving in your own whānau? We would love to hear your stories in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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