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New Zealand Plants and their Story

[introduction]

Lying isolated from neighbouring land-masses far out in the broad Pacific, New Zealand offered conditions for plant-life different from those of most other regions. Its area, greater by far than that of any oceanic group of islands, is sufficient to have allowed the development of a rich vegetation made up of many species. The land of the "Maori and Moa," as a poet has called our land, has long been famous from both the ethnological and zoological standpoints. The remarkable race of aborigines, with their interesting manners and customs, is known far and wide. Scientific men the world over, and many of the general public, for that matter, have an acquaintance more or less intimate with the giant birds of a former age, and their fast-vanishing relatives, the kiwis of to-day.

But when it comes to the question of the plant-life there is a pause. To be sure, New Zealand is known as the land of ferns, and not without truth; yet this admired group is found nearly all the world over, and is really much less important than are plenty of the other in digenous plants. Many members of our flora, indeed, are specially noteworthy, and there is little doubt but that, as a whole, the plants page 2 of New Zealand are every whit as interesting as are the animals, while, although less voluminous, their story can hardly be surpassed in interest by that of the vegetation of an entire continent. A plant population can surely claim its share of recognition when it can boast of including the largest known buttercup,1 the smallest member of the pine-tree family,2 a forget-me-not with leaves as big as those of rhubarb3 (fig. 1), a speedwell 40 ft. in height,4 tree-like daisies,5 mosses a foot or more tall,6 brown seaweeds of enormous size7(fig. 2), and those strange anomalies of the plant world, the vegetable-sheep.8
Fig. 1.—The Chatham Island Forget-me-not (Myosotidimn nobile), growing near sea in north of Chatham Island. [Photo, L. Cockayne.

Fig. 1.—The Chatham Island Forget-me-not (Myosotidimn nobile), growing near sea in north of Chatham Island. [Photo, L. Cockayne.