Gastrodia minor Petrie
Type locality: "Town Belt, Dunedin, in shady manuka bush". Type: AK 3688 and WELT 19064, both dated Decr. 1892, appear to be parts of the original gathering.
Plant at fl. c. 8–30–(40) cm. tall. Swollen rhizomes extensively branched, individual parts to 4 × 1 cm. Stem us. slender. Scale lvs very few, small and widely spaced. Fls us. < 10, sts erect, apparently sts cleistogamic. Per. c. 10 mm. long, brownish; lobes slightly thickened marginally. Lateral sepals connate little above the gibbous base, but their margins lying close together. Labellum narrow-oblong, long-adnate to per.-tube; long median calli rather simple; margin narrow and little undulate, thickened distally. Column very short, wing represented only by a minute erect process; anther short, operculate, filament scarcely pleated at back; stigma immediately below anther.
DIST.: N., S. Most collections from about Lake Taupo and Wellington; also from Dunedin, Lake Manapouri and Waituna Lagoon, Southland.
Principally if not exclusively under Leptospermum.
FL. 12–1–(3).
Small plants from Ahipara, Dec. 19, 1918, H. B. Matthews (AK 3686 and WELT 19062), though determined as G. minor, have the long column of G. sesamoides.
Petrie records finding both G. minor and G. cunninghamii in fl. in the neighbourhood of Dunedin at the same time, and Campbell (loc. cit. 1963, 73) writes of G. minor growing only 60 cm. distant from the larger G. cunninghamii —the former associated with Leptospermum scoparium, the latter with Nothofagus.
