This paper will explore botanical collecting and recording by the Royal Society party on board HMB Endeavour during their visit to Tairāwhiti on the east coast of Aotearoa New Zealand in October 1769, tracing their movements on land and sea and their exchanges with tāngata whenua.

It will reflect upon the differences and resonances between ancestral Māori ideas about plants and people and those of Enlightenment and modernist science, and how these differences and similarities have played out in Tairāwhiti and Aotearoa over the past 255 years.

Examining the records kept by naturalists who travelled in New Zealand between 1769 and 1830, including Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander and figures such as Allan Cunningham, this talk analyses the processes used to obtain information on species deemed new to European botany. It explores different approaches to classifying the natural world and how Māori knowledge became integrated with European frameworks. The analysis examines the processes of obtaining information and the integration of this into a range of different paper technologies used to identify, classify and record the details of different plants. It then moves on to analyse how these records and the information they contain were used both by later travellers and by naturalists in institutions—some of the first state-employed curators who assembled vast collections of the world’s flora. This casts new light on the political motivations of Māori for communicating information and European natural history curators’ approaches to integrating this within broader frameworks to recontextualise the flora of New Zealand in the global age revolutions.

The flora of New Zealand holds the stories of the past, present, and future of this land, its people, and their interactions. In this talk I will share how The 1769 Garden, found in the Waimata Valley near Gisborne, New Zealand is an ideal setting to hold and share these stories, in interactive ways, fostering a deeper understanding of our botanical and cultural heritage while posing questions about our future.

Initiated by Dame Anne Salmond and her late husband Jeremy, the garden is designed to mark the intersection of Māori and European worldviews. The garden design and species selection by Philip Smith, makes it an ideal place to communicate the explorations of Sir Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander during Captain Cook's voyage on the Endeavour in 1769. I’ll also discuss how the garden brings together globally significant stories of New Zealand botany, with references to botanical nomenclature, taxonomy, and present day plant conservation but also holds stories of Mātauranga Māori (Traditional Māori knowledge), and difficult conversations around invasive species, colonization etc.