Winter plant palettes
Werewere-kokako
Entoloma Hochstetteri
Werewere gets an honourable mention because it is BRIGHT BLUE. That photo is untouched. There is a much more common Entoloma which is sulfur yellow, and another which is cartoonishly bright red. These mushrooms tend to be solitary creatures, and enjoy dark-ish, wet-ish spaces under trees.
You can’t find this species in shops, but you can encourage it by avoiding use of chemical sprays, including copper.
Kowhai
Kowhai Sophora
Kowhai has bright yellow flowers in late winter, when it hasn't got a lot of leaves, and very little else is flowering. The softness of the new shoots, a pink-ish, green-ish, pale brown, show a real complexity of texture and colour which follows right down the trunk to the ground.
A side note, kowhai often lose all of their leaves to fuzzy caterpillars in Summer and Autumn (Uresiphita polygonalis maorialis, find out more here). This doesn’t appear to stress the tree and the leaves grow back fairly quickly; please consider letting nature take its course and encouraging our native moths by letting this happen <3
Mānuka
Mānuka, leptospermum scoparium
Mānuka comes in a variety of colours and sizes. The needle-like foliage is usually quite dark and fades to the background; when a Mānuka flowers the entire tree is smothered in the blooms. Gorgeous (and bees love it!)
Pūriri
Vitex Lucens
Puriri is a large tree which attracts an enormous, bright green moth which is interesting in and of itself. The flowers are quite large, clustered, pink and trumpet like; the berries that follow ripen at different times, leading to clusters of berries varying from pink to red.
Sources
All photos CC by NC. Please use as you please, but attribute them to the right person, and they are not to be used for financial gain.
Entoloma Hochsttertii: Caleb Watts shared this in a mushroom spotting group that I am a part of, and he has kindly allowed us to use it.
Kowhai Sophora: User Velela, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kowhai_flowers.jpg Accessed 29.07.23
Leptospermum Scoparium: Josh Jackson - IMG_2810.JPG, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3941871
Vitex Lucens: Bennett, W. https://www.nzpcn.org.nz/flora/species/vitex-lucens/ Retrieved 15.6.23