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Overview
In her introductions to these books, Adams provides beautiful descriptions of several alpine locations around the country – including the Tararua Range, Canterbury, Taranaki, and Fiordland National Park – and suggests where and when mountain flowers might be found in these areas. She encourages readers to explore these ecosystems with care and admiration:
Please remember that in many places the mountain plants are protected and are not to be gathered. To sketch or photograph them is a pleasurable way of recording their beauty.
The watercolour illustrations and line drawings in these books are accompanied by rich and engaging text describing the flowers’ colour variations, habitat preferences, seasonal growth patterns, and how they may have gotten their common names. These descriptions evoke both the precise scientific accuracy and the warm, whimsical accessibility that was also the hallmark of Adams’ illustrative style.
This watercolour can be found on page 23 of Mountain Flowers of New Zealand (1965) and on page 62 of Mountain Flowers in New Zealand, illustrating a species of forget-me-not, Myosotis colensoi.
In Adams’ 1965 description, she writes:
Of the thirty or more native forget-me-nots many are rare plants that have been collected infrequently. Nearly all the species are white-flowered, a few yellow, and two have yellowish-bronze flowers. Two blue-flowered species have been recorded from the Canterbury mountains; those from the subantarctic islands are pale to deep violet-blue.
Myosotis colensoi is one of the rarer species, known only from the limestone screes of the Broken River Basin.….flowering in early December.