Plant People: Melanie Mark-Shadbolt

June 25, 2025

In Māori culture, taonga refers to that which is highly-prized or treasured. Taonga could be a body of water, a mountain, a bird, or a seed. Caring for Aotearoa (New Zealand)’s taonga is central to the work of Te Tira Whakamātaki, an independent Māori nonprofit organization dedicated to the protection of the environment. 

The organization’s name translates as “the watchful ones,” a reference to their stewardship of Aotearoa’s treasured places, plants and biodiversity. Their work includes predator control, pest eradication, and whare taonga (seed banking). Since its formation in 2017, Te Tira Whakamātaki has distributed more than a dozen kits called “seed drums” across New Zealand, teaching communities how to build, manage, and maintain them. 

Te Tira Whakamātaki’s cofounder and CEO, Melanie Mark-Shadbolt, explains that for Māori people, it is essential to preserve seeds in a way that respects sacred land, follows proper protocols, and is socially, ethically, and legally sound.

Melanie spoke with NTBG’s member’s magazine The Bulletin from her home in Rangiora, a small community near the coast on the South Island about the importance of seed banking in Aotearoa and her own relationship with plants.

How did your organization start banking seeds?

We have a really strong biosecurity background and a lot of our work has been about keeping harmful things out of Aotearoa. In 2014, colleagues from Hawaiʻi and other places told us we needed to keep an eye on myrtle rust (the fungal disease Austropuccinia psidii) which is detrimental to forests and devastating for cultural practices. We started looking at how myrtle rust could impact New Zealand, and we knew pretty much straight away — especially from NTBG’s work — that seed banking was going to be core to protecting our trees from myrtle rust. After years of investing in projects and holding traditional meetings around the country asking communities how they might respond to myrtle rust, we decided to establish this network in 2017.

Te Tira Whakamātaki ramped up very quickly because myrtle rust was on our shores a month after our launch and seed banking was one of our areas of interest. In the early days our work was almost entirely based on seeds.

In what ways are seeds important in Māori culture?

We have a Māori proverb that says E kore au e ngaro, he kākano i ruia mai i Rangiātea (“I shall never be lost. I am a seed sown from Rangiātea), Rangiātea being where we come from. Who we are as a people is connected to our journey across the Pacific. Seed collection and distribution tells the story of where our ancestors have traveled across the world. They kept us company in our travels, provided for us, and so they’re like family to us, probably like they are with Kanaka maoli (Native Hawaiians).

How did you get involved with distributing seed drum kits?

We reached out to our colleagues and friends at the Millennium Seed Bank during the myrtle rust incursion and they were really helpful. They told us about their seed drums that are distributed in emergencies. They sent a couple to New Zealand and we realized that with a seed drum kit, our communities could have everything they needed to keep the seeds at home where they could manage them, love them, care for them, and monitor them. I think since 2018 we’ve distributed maybe 15 kits that we’ve funded and built. We’ve also helped communities build their own and run courses to train people to use them.

Our dream for the seed drums is to ensure that every marae, that’s a traditional meeting house in a community village, could have one. Every community weaving group could also have one if they wanted, as could every tohunga (expert priests, healers, navigators, etc.), wetland restoration project, or anyone who wants a kit for their piece of land.

In 2018 you visited NTBG’s seed bank and laboratory on Kaua‛i. How did that visit influence your work?  

That has informed our thinking and design hugely and was probably one of the best visits we’ve had. Coming to see your seed bank with Dustin Wolkis and talking about community involvement, especially to those in the language revitalization space, was really eye opening for us. 

One factor we hadn’t considered until we visited NTBG was how involved communities can become in terms of donating things like insect collections, books, and things the community brings because they see you as a safe set of hands with which to leave their taonga — their treasures. That greatly informed us because we liked the community feel.

Let’s talk about plants that are important in Māori culture.

Probably one of the most well-known plants is mānuka (Leptospermum scoparium) because New Zealand is known for our mānuka honey. It was once considered a scrub plant and now people are desperate to keep mānuka everywhere because the honey is so sought after. It has beautiful pink or white flowers. For Māori it’s a really important medicine plant. It’s a good example of a plant that is significant to both Māori and non-Māori from an economic and, for us, from a cultural perspective. 

What about a plant that’s not as well known?

I’ve been trying to grow the akeake bush (Dodonaea viscosa) which has long, thin leaves. It was traditionally used to treat a variety of conditions, but wasn’t really popular outside of Māori circles until nurseries picked it up. There’s lots of focus on plants here in Aotearoa, especially traditional medicine plants. But we also have a really diverse range of fungi and a huge variety of ferns and they are much harder to collect. It’s something we’re just starting to think about, how we might collect and store those. We have a black tree fern called mamaku (Cyathea medullaris), which I personally really love. Our ferns are really diverse and unique, with huge medicinal and cultural importance. 

What is one tree closely identified with Aotearoa?

Our pōhutukawa tree is the equivalent of Hawaiʻi’s ʻōhiʻa trees (Metrosideros sp.). You rarely see them inland, but you see it everywhere on our shorelines. We have some really significant pōhutukawa, including a tree that the stories say is the mother of all pōhutukawa trees across the Pacific. It sits right out on the shoreline in the very farthest reaches of New Zealand’s east coast and sends its seeds across the Pacific so for us it’s connected to your trees, it’s a sibling.

For some of my tribes, pōhutukawa and other trees were used to suspend our corpses before the bones were interred. That’s our traditional practice. Those trees are where we farewell our departed. They are not just pretty. They are very much part of our lives in everything we do from building houses and creating clothing, to healing our people, and also farewelling our deceased at the end and protecting them.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.