Pseudowintera Dandy

A genus of four species endemic to New Zealand, which were included in Drimys until 1933. From that genus they are distinct in their flowers: in Drimys the calyx completely encloses the petals in the bud and falls as the flowers expand, while in Pseudowintera the calyx is small, cup-shaped, only enclosing the flowers when very young, and persistent (Dandy 1933). Pseudowintera axillaris is the type species – the first to be described – but P. colorata is more common in cultivation in our area, based primarily on the attraction of its colourful foliage and for its medicinal properties. P. axillaris differs mainly in the leaves that are glossy green above and lack the reddish marking (Metcalf 2000). P. traversii is a small shrub up to 90 cm or more with small oval leaves found in the northern West Coast of North Island, uncommon in the wild and not cultivated in our area.​​​​ P. insperata, described in 2006, is a small tree with an upright growth habit; it is extremely rare, with fewer than 50 plants recorded from two extant populations in North Auckland (Heenan & de Lange 2006); it is found only in some New Zealand gardens (Grant 2025).

Pseudowintera, particularly P. colorata, have a long tradition in New Zealand’s indigenous Māori culture as medicinal plants, used to treat a wide range of ailments including fungal skin diseases, venereal diseases, toothache, and stomach complaints. It is widely known as Horopito, its common name in Māori, and also as ‘Māori painkiller’. The leaves are rich in polygodial, a chemical that has antifungal, antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and insecticidal effects (Nadia et al. 2017). The plants grow in damp forests continually subject to insect and fungal attack. It is likely that they evolved a battery of chemical defenses in order to survive in these conditions (Forest Herbs Research 2025).

The taxonomy of this genus has a chequered past, best understood by summarizing some family history, which like so many of the best families involves a little illegitimacy here and there. Drimys, the first Winteraceae genus to be described by J.R. and G. Forster in 1776, was originally based on D. axillaris (now Pseudowintera axillaris) and D. winteri. In 1784, J.A. Murray unnecessarily and therefore illegitimately tried to change the genus name to Wintera, though in so doing he failed to mention D. axillaris, only including D. winteri and D. granadensis, by then already described. Georg Forster, who had previously published Drimys together with his father J.R., followed Murray and moved D. axillaris to Wintera in 1786. When van Tieghem in 1900 correctly separated out the New Zealand species of Winteraceae into their own genus, he adopted for them the name Wintera, attributing it to G. Forster. He rightly regarded Murray’s name as a synonym, but he wrongly assumed it had no validity (‘Le nom Wintera Murray n’existe pas!’, he wrote). He stated that he was using it in Forster’s sense, not Murray’s, but that does not stop Wintera G.Forst. ex Tiegh being a later homonym and hence illegitimate. Dandy set things right in 1933 by amending van Tieghem’s Wintera to Pseudowintera, establishing a clear identity for the New Zealand taxa.

Unfortunately, when Drimys was published by the Forsters, they did not designate one of the two known American species as the type of the genus when they published Drimys. De Candolle (1817) did that when he established the section Drimys to include the single species D. axillaris, placing D. winteri together with others in section Wintera. This lectotypification was not affected by Murray’s publication, so when Dandy used D. axillaris as the type species for Pseudowintera, he should have retained Drimys for D. axillaris and the other New Zealand species. The consequence would have been that the generic name of D. winteri and the other well-known American species would have had to be changed to the next available name, Tasmannia. This was only prevented by the intervention of Vink, who in 1969 proposed to conserve Drimys, despite its difficult history, as the name for the American Winteraceae. His solution fortunately saved us from further taxonomic disruption.