Some Bush Lore.

From North Auckland a native friend learned in practical bush craft now and again sends me a note of interest concerning the trees and shrubs of our indigenous forests. He has gathered from his old people, and from his own experience, a mass of information about the medicinal value of many of our plants. Some of this is becoming generally known, such as the usefulness of the common koromiko (veronica), but there is a vast amount of lore on the subject quite a sealed book yet to our botanical chemists and medicine-makers.

A curious item from my correspondent concerns the neinei or dracophyllum, that tropic-looking slender tuft-tree with its trunk branched in candelabrum fashion and its long narrow grass-like leaves crowded in rosettes at the tips of the page 19 branches. It is called by bushmen the spiderwood. This neinei, says my North Auckland correspondent, is the sacred tree of Tawhaki, that heroic figure in Maori-Polynesian mythology who climbed to the upper heavens by a vine, or, as some say, by a spider's-thread, in search of his vanished wife. The heart of the tree, as seen by the Maori eye, shows Tawhaki in the act of ascending to the sky.

There are fanciful allusions to the legendary Tawhaki in the tree-lore of other parts of the country. Up in the Urewera Ranges once I was admiring the rich showering of crimson flowers on a large rata tree close to the track we were riding along. My Maori companions said, “Those blossoms are the blood of Tawhaki, in our old stories. When he was ascending to the tenth heaven by a magical vine, some of his blood fell and stained those forest trees. Also, we call the rata flowers the eyes of Tawhaki.”

Reverting to the neinei, it is strange to see it growing close up to the ice of the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers; in fact it can be seen on the mountain side high above the glaciers, and a clump of these tuft trees makes a quite fantastic foreground for a picture of the wonderful pinnacles and the pure white down-slant of the iceflows. I think that South Westland region is the furthest south habitat of the dracophyllum family.