Visitors to Orokonui Ecosanctuary delight in the lushly beautiful bush, the bird-song and glimpses of birds and creatures otherwise seldom seen.
They may come away knowing more about the restoration of eco-systems and appreciate that there is more to our natural world than at first meets the eye.
However, few get down on their hands and knees to take a closer look at the forest floor and the organisms that grow there - the fungi that spring up in autumn, the translucent filmy ferns and the mosses that form vivid cushions after rain.
But how many people can actually distinguish between a moss, a liverwort and a lichen?
Dr Knight has loved lichens for years and is always eager to foster fresh enthusiasm. When she agreed to take a workshop at Orokonui a couple of years ago, she discovered it was rich in lichens, and was delighted to teach others about them.
So what is a lichen?
Dr Knight explains: "It is not strictly a plant, it's actually a miniature ecosystem, a fungus in intimate symbiosis with a green alga or a cyanobacterium, or both. Or, as Trevor Goward put it so vividly, 'Lichens are fungi that have discovered agriculture'.
The fungus provides shelter and the alga uses energy from the sun to produce food making it easier to understand why the lichen always gets its name from the unique 'farmer' fungus, which shares its green algal or cyanobacterial 'crop' with many other fungi."
The Latin names are a challenge for the beginning botanist, but it is not so difficult to learn to distinguish the three main types of lichen: foliose (leafy), fruticose (twiggy) and crustose (crusty, embedded). It is best to look for them when it is damp, as then the algal colours show through. When dry, the greyish outer layer of fungus predominates.
"One of the most conspicuous and common of the large, leafy lichens at Orokonui is Pseudocyphellaria rufovirescens, hanging from the trunks of old-growth trees along the Kaka track and in other shady, moist places. It has a bright green upper surface and a pale lower surface. The red-brown disc-shaped fruiting bodies (apothecia) along the margins of the loosely hanging mature lobes are a good indication that it is a lichen.
"Little twiggy lichens abound in well-lit areas. Bright orange Teloschistes, pale yellow Usnea and grey Ramalina species perch on twigs. Great swards of the common and variable Cladia aggregata, grow under the kanuka, while many different species of the genus Cladonia, which includes the pixie-cup lichens, can be spied in open areas.
"The flat, embedded crustose lichens often look like paint-splashes on rocks and bark. Powdery yellow Chrysothrixcandelaris stands out like fluoro paint on kanuka bark, while the white Phlyctis species prefer smooth-barked trees lining shadier tracks."
That workshop, when most went home happy to have identified a few lichens correctly, brought Dr Knight an unexpected bonus. At home, looking at a green crustose specimen under her microscope, she realised it was not the common Megalaria grossa as she had thought, but nor did it quite match a rare relative that had been found in New Zealand in 1888, M. spodophana: "To check the match further, I sliced one of the tiny apothecia, only 1mm across, with a razorblade, carefully transferred the minute slices to a drop of water on a glass slide, and slid a glass cover-slip over the top. After a few gentle taps the spores emerged and I could measure them at 400 times magnification. To my puzzlement they were nearly twice as big as the spores of M. spodophana. It wasn't going to be easy to identify this puzzling lichen."
New Zealand lichen expert David Galloway suggested contacting world Megalaria expert Alan Fryday, who determined that this was indeed a new species. Dr Knight wanted to honour Orokonui in the name.
So now Orokonui can claim its very own new species: Megalaria orokonuiana.
• Alyth Grant is a volunteer worker at Orokonui Ecosanctuary and a member of the ONHT board.
The Wild Ways column appears on the first Saturday of the month.
