#1926 - Melicytus ramiflorus - Māhoe
A small, much-branched tree from the Violet family, growing to a height of about 10m. In open lowland and lower montane forest throughout New Zealand it is one of the most common trees. It frequently germinates as an epiphyte on tree ferns. The bark is a whitish colour and the branchlets very brittle.
Decaying Māhoe leaves form characteristic skeletonised leaves, piling up around the base of the tree.
The scented, small, yellow flowers appear in late spring, and the purple berries in late summer and are eaten by native birds such as the Kereru, Tui honeyeaters, and geckos of the genus Naultinus. They don’t seem to be edible to humans, however. Both flowers and fruit grow directly from the trunk - ramiflory.
The Maori used the liquid from boiled leaves as an external treatment for rheumatism and scabies, but the main use of this species was in the friction method of fire lighting - a slab of the soft wood scraped with a pointed stick of harder species in order to make a flame.
There is, naturally, mythology about this, and perhaps predictably it involves Maui – the great trickster god of Polynesian tradition. One day Maui set out to learn the secret of fire, put out all the fires in his village, and volunteered to go meet with his Grandmother Mahuika the fire god whose fingernails were made of flame. He persuaded Mahuika to part with one of her fingernails, and then immediately extinguished it in a nearby river. Maui persuaded her to give him another nail, and another, and continued to put them out in the water. By the last nail, Mahuika realized what Maui was doing and in a fit of anger threw up a great flame that threatened to ignite the earth, boil the seas, and burn the forests. So Maui called on his ancestor Tāwhirimātea – god of the weather - to put out the flame.
Mahuika collected the last few sparks and looked for somewhere to place them. The trees of rata, hīnau, kahikatea, rimu, and miro all refused, but the kaikomako and mahoe accepted. Maui saw Mahuika place the spark of fire in these trees, and returned to his village to show his family and friends how they could bring out the fire by rubbing them together.
