Aloha mai kākou, tēnā koutou! I am currently on break from my classes, so I decided to go bike-packing. This is sort of like backpacking, where you bring a tent, food, and sleeping bags with you and hike through the woods, only you pack it all on your bike instead of your back! We went down to Port Waikato, which was an 87km (about 55 miles!) bike ride from Auckland. It was really hard to bike carrying all the stuff for camping! My legs are very sore. There was a lot of beautiful scenery on the way, but one plant that kept jumping out at me was this tall grass with fluffy flowers at the top of it. As we biked by, I wondered, "What plant is that?" When I got home, I looked it up, and I discovered that there are two plants that it could be - "pampas" or "toetoe".
The plant that I saw while biking is very tall, maybe up to 10-12 feet tall. Its stem seems like grass, either light brown or light green, and it has fluff on the end, kind of like a feather duster. The fluff seemed to be a range of colors, from white to pale yellow to brown.
After a bit of research, I discovered that this plant could either be "pampas" or "toetoe". Both are grassy with fluff at the end, but apparently, pampas is an invasive weed from South America, while toetoe is native to Aotearoa.
