Our Changing World: The Ngutukākā Festival

Our Changing World goes in search of one of Aotearoa’s rarest plants – the stunning kakabeak, or ngutukākā. 

Its clusters of bright red blooms, each shaped like a parrot’s beak, make it a popular garden plant. But in the wild, ngutukākā is barely holding on.

Considered “nationally critical” by the Department of Conservation, only about 100 individual ngutukākā plants survive, clinging to exposed steep bluffs where goats and rabbits can’t get to them.

But now, locals along the East Coast, the kakabeak’s last stronghold, are determined to reverse its march towards extinction by propagating wild plants to turn State Highway 35 into a crimson highway.

Veronika Meduna joins them for the inaugural Ngutukākā Festival.