Wild Garden of the Hooker.

Of all the places of charm within easy walking distance of the Hermitage, the pleasantest for a stroll is the tussocky valley up which a track leads between the crumbling precipices of the Cook Range and the lateral moraine of the Hooker Glacier. This glen is strewn about with huge lichen-crusted rocks either fallen from the heights or borne by ice in the era when the glacier was wider and longer than it is to-day. A stream ripples through the glen, a beautiful little stream of purest, coldest water, almost as blue as the sky; it is filtered of silt by its passage underground from the glacier. It goes cascading and murmuring down in curves and half-coils, and sometimes you may see the blue mountain duck swimming on the pools, and hear their peculiar whistling call, the “whio, whio” that gives them their Maori name. It is a wild park, but without trees; small alpine shrubs cluster about the grey rocks; and in the season of flowers all the mountain blossoms are here—the golden-eyed celmisia daisy with its curious soft white furry thickness of stem and leaf; the great cupleaved page 21 buttercup, or mountain lily as it is popularly called; and the carpeting of sweet little gentians and their like. And all around is the tremendous sweep of sky-high peaks, alive with the voice of avalanches and many waters.

But to see the garden valley at its best you must come here in or about the month of December. Then all the flowers and the blossoming shrubs are out, and the glen of the blue stream is fragrant under the midsummer sun. The celmisia is particularly plentiful. It has a Maori name not generally known, tikumu (with the accent on the first syllable).

A Favourite Glissading Field In The New Zealand Alps.
A scene on the slopes of Mt. Sealey (near the Hermitage) shewing Mt. Cook, 12,349ft., in the centre of the picture.

The Ngai-Tahu and Ngati-Mamoe people came to the upland parts of the land hunting the weka, the woodhen, when it was fat with feeding on the mikimiki berries, and they took the opportunity to gather tikumu for personal decoration. The thick gleaming leaves were worn as a head adornment, a substitute for feathers. The leaves were sometimes split—you can do it with a pocket-knife, they used thin flakes of stone—and were made up into soft waving bands which the girls wore as anklets and armlets in their dances and on other festive occasions.