Auckland Botanic Gardens

This guide to the Auckland Botanic Gardens starts in the Threatened Native Plant Garden with the kakabeak, a red-flowered shrub down to roughly a hundred and fifty wild plants in the whole country, and the browsing animals it has no defence against. It traces the gardens themselves to a 1960s council decision to carve a green refuge from the old Nathan family farm, opened in 1982 by botanist David Bellamy. Look for how conservationists now try to get kakabeak seed onto cliffs no animal can reach.