Cabbage tree finds allure in UK

The cabbage tree - symbol of rugged bush and swamp to Kiwis - is an exotic palm of upmarket gardens to people in the south of England.

Wellington photographer Wayne Barrar was amazed when he arrived for a three-month fellowship at the University of Plymouth in March to see the humble cabbage tree, Cordyline australis or ti kouka, treated completely differently and in different settings.

They were street trees, the star turns of Italian gardens. They were in pots, in traffic islands, shorn and pollarded, "liberated from their indigenous roots". They were even becoming a problem by seeding copiously in London.

Devon and Cornwall are marketed as "the English Riviera". They are warmer than the rest of England and cabbage trees are their official logo, known variously as Torbay, Manx and Cornish palms.

Barrar has been investigating landscape for 30 years and was well aware of the flood of European plants into New Zealand since colonial times. Seeing cabbage trees in England was colonisation in reverse, he thought.

He explores that idea in his Torbay ti kouka exhibition at Wanganui's McNamara Gallery. It finishes on October 28.

In it are photographs of cabbage trees on traffic islands, as street trees, on a tropical-themed golf course and illuminated at night. They contrast with black and white photographs of the species in its natural habitat in New Zealand. The English photographs are digital, and the New Zealand ones were taken with a large-format wooden camera.

Barrar is an associate professor and associate head of fine arts at Massey University in Wellington. Trained as a teacher, he taught science and photography in Wanganui for 15 years before moving to Wellington in the 1990s to teach photography.

The latest themes he has explored photographically are biodiversity and underground construction. His The Expanding Subterra show is on in Washington DC and has travelled widely overseas.