Towai

Value to bees

Nectar

High

Pollen

Moderate

As a honey crop

Minor honey crop — a surplus only locally or occasionally

Which bees, and why

Long racemes of small open flowers with easily accessible nectar, worked heavily by honey bees and by native birds.

Worth knowing

The first native forest crop of the northern New Zealand season, and one that is increasingly marketed on its own terms rather than blended.

Flowering

In flower

October to December (southern hemisphere)

Earlier than kamahi, and it opens the Northland native honey season ahead of the manuka flow.

When nectar flows

Free and heavy in a good year, and the tree flowers in enough abundance across northern forest to give a genuine crop.

Year-to-year variation

Flowering intensity varies considerably between years, as it does for most New Zealand forest trees.

What it does to the honey

Gives a very pale honey with a delicate, faintly butterscotch sweetness — noticeably lighter and milder than kamahi from the same genus.

Growing it

Conditions

Mild frost-free conditions on moist acid soil in sun or light shade.

Size

8-15 m.

Native range

The northern North Island of New Zealand, in lowland and lower montane forest.

Suits

Large gardens

• A handsome forest tree, occasionally planted in New Zealand gardens and rare elsewhere.
• Regenerates readily on cleared land in Northland.

What it looks like

A small to medium evergreen with toothed compound juvenile leaves and simpler adult ones, carrying dense creamy-white bottlebrush racemes that flush the canopy pale in early summer.