Tī kōuka – cabbage tree

Cabbage trees are a type of tree lily, like agave, yucca, and dracaena. Their tufted heads are familiar beacons in New Zealand landscapes.
The many cabbage trees now growing in paddocks and on bare hillsides are survivors from earlier land clearances and the creation of drainage for farming.
(Thanks to the Te Ara Encyclopedia of NZ for this information.)

It's hard to say how old this stand of cabbage trees is. They are growing on the farm my father was brought up on in Orepuki, Western Southland. I like to think they are the ones that I remember growing outside Granny and Grandpa's house when I was a child ... the ones clumped together in a squat bundle, a friendly, rustling skirt of old, dry fronds covering their trunks. They look big enough to be fifty years old, so it could well be the same stand. As nothing is left of the house, I found it hard to pinpoint where exactly it would have been. And you know how memory plays its tricks. I can only hope that they are the same ones and that I was lucky enough to get a photo of them; for the record.

cabbage trees

Useless
as a shelter, the pleasure
is more in the symmetry
of ink-splash spokes,
the clack of rays
against blue air.
Of green slaps in rain
from tousled manes.

Their crumpled trunks,
their solitary stand.
Their rough guard
of windy outcrops.
Their punctuation
of horizons. In the way
these lilies
do not lean, but weather.