Rare moss wins New Zealand’s favourite plant title
Terricolous patch under shaded mānuka fen on lake margin, Pouto. Photo: Marley FordFor the first time in the competitions 23-year history a moss has won as part of the New Zealand Plant Conservation Networks annual favourite plant competition. This year’s vote varied to previous years with just 40 candidates available, all species put at risk by climate change.
The winning moss Archidium elatum only grows to about 15mm tall and is known from just a handful of sites in the upper North Island and Rēkohu Chatham Island. It is one of our least known mosses. Recently it was classed as critically endangered, from the location it was first discovered in at Ahipara it has not been seen since.
Aotearoa is home to just under 3000 vascular plants, and around 550 moss species. So, it is about time a moss won the competition.
Archidium elatum faces many threats including smothering by weeds like Kikuyu grass that out compete it. However, it is the looming threat of climate change that made this rare moss a candidate for this year’s vote. Known only from coastal sites, its survival is uncertain as rising sea levels shift its habitat, particularly given the extensive modification of our coastlines.
Despite its highly threatened status and its crown as New Zealand’s favourite plant, we still know very little about this species and our native mosses in general. Marley Ford recently served on the moss threat listing panel of Aotearoa, which identified almost a third of our moss species as at risk or threatened. A further 36 taxa were assessed as Data Deficient, meaning there is not enough information to determine their conservation status.
Marley comments on Archidium’s win: “There is still much to discover in the moss world, with new locations for very rare species being found all the time. A moss winning 2025 Favourite Native Plant highlights the awhi we have for the moss world but also reminds us of all the work still needed to care for these taonga.”
NZPCN President Jesse Bythell confesses she didn’t vote for the moss, but instead backed a plant famous amongst southern botanists because it lives at over 2,700 m above sea level in only two areas in Aoraki Mount Cook National Park. “Graham’s buttercup (Ranunculus grahamaii) is so rare we only have a single image of it on our website - it is probably encountered by mountaineers and invasive browsers like chamois and tahr more often than intrepid botanists”. Jesse Bythell hopes to one day this plant before it is too late.
For most of the competition of the top five were dominated by coastal species like pīngao Ficinia spiralis and rimurehia/eel grass (Zostera muelleri subsp. novozelandica). Macmahon’s rock daisy (Celmisia macmahonii var. macmahonii),a species only known from from Mt Stokes at the top of the South Island held the top spot for the first few weeks until the moss votes gathered momentum in the the final few days of the vote.
Caring for these plants is not just an abstract ‘nice to have’, these species are significant, either because of the cultural uses and connection they symbolise or because of the important ecostem services they provide for us, like sheltering juvenile fish (eelgrass) or protecting coastal dunes.
“We don’t always get an opportunity to celebrate these less flashy parts of our flora” says vote coordinator Taylor Davies-Colley. “It’s great to see the public get behind a moss species, to celebrate what makes them special, and to highlight everything we still don’t know about these unique taonga.”
Posted: 24/12/2025