Pampas are generally on the taller side and stand more upright, with a range of flower (fluff) colors, from white to pink, while toetoe are droopier and have flowers that are cream-colored or golden. (Check this website out for more distinguishing features between the two plants!)
Based on this, do you think the plants I saw were toetoe or pampas?
I really liked seeing these fluffy grasses! They seem to grow all over the hillsides and beside the road as well, and their fluffiness was quite cute.
However, knowing now that some of them might have been the invasive pampas, I feel frustrated. Apparently, people intentionally introduced pampas to Aotearoa to provide food and shelter for cattle and other livestock, and since then, the pampas has been taking over huge amounts of land and crowding out other native species. It's always angering to hear about species that were introduced without a lot of thought, like the mangroves in Hawaiʻi. It's especially frustrating when the reason the invasive species are introduced in the first place is to make a very small set of people a lot of money, or to patch up a problem in an unsustainable way. The mangroves in Hawaiʻi were introduced because there was a lot of erosion along the shores, since all the big plantation farming was ruining the soil quality, so instead of fixing the original problem, which was the soil quality, mangroves were introduced to hold the shorelines together. Similarly, instead of asking whether the whenua (ʻāina) here in Aotearoa can sustainably support all those cattle and sheep in the first place, people just looked for ways to accommodate even more livestock.
