Tutira
Chapter XII. — The Vegetation of the Station Prior to Settlement
Chapter XII.
The Vegetation of the Station Prior to Settlement.
The two halves of New Zealand are separated by a narrow strait. At the date of their discovery, one—the South Island—was an open land fit for immediate settlement, carrying nutritious grasses; the other—the North Island—was a vast tangle of fern, of scrub, and of forest. In it there was no open country ready to the settler's hand; the pioneers of the North had to create their pasturage.
On Tutira grew a few acres of tussock-grass (Poa cœspitosa), a few score acres of flax (Phormium tenax) and of raupo (Typha angustifolia). A few hundred acres also of forest and woodland lay hidden in gorges and ravines. Otherwise, over the whole station stretched an illimitable sea of bracken (Pteris aquilina, var. esculenta). This plant, against which the station has been battling for more than forty years, delights in loose humus, sandy soil, and pumice grit. Into such soils—never dry, yet never water-logged—its rhizomes penetrate many feet. It is perhaps the only fern which thrives on manure. Year after year it will invade garden-plots; it will persist season after season in sheepyards. On ploughed grounds fed with artificials its fronds spring taller, thicker in stem, and of a deeper green.
In fallen forest country, burnt and elsewhere grassed, every hollow stump eight or ten feet across, into which stock cannot reach, becomes a huge fern - vase. The fenced - in railway lines carry on either side, through cleared bushland, long ribbons of bracken. Intermingled with light open bush, I have measured fronds fourteen feet long. So situated, they develop something of the habits of a creeper—the stalks becoming finer and more pliable, the lower pinnæ aborting, the whole frond growing languorous and etiolated. In open lands on Tutira growth was most luxuriant on eastern and southern slopes. page 98 On such aspects, in competition with tutu (Coraria ruscifolia) and koromiko (Veronica salicifolia), fern averaged five or six feet in height. On hot dry northern and western slopes it grew a foot or two less. No dry soil, however, was too bad to nourish bracken. Stunted to a few stiff inches, it covered alike the driest hill-tops and the most arid flats.
The growth of the plant is as follows: early in November myriads of minute brown-green circinate fronds begin to appear, each uplifting its own little cap of earth, as trap-door spiders raise the lids of their dry homes. Later these fronds grow into notes of interrogation, then, rising well above the old growth, each opens into the likeness of a man's hand bent back from the wrist, with fingers still curled up.
Later again the fronds develop into antlered spikes mossed with ferruginous dust. At last, fully unfolded, they assume the sombre green hue characteristic of fern country in New Zealand. On poorest soils bracken most quickly matures; on good ground weeks pass before the fronds attain completion. After its spring growth, unless scorched by fire or eaten by stock, the plant rests until the following spring. Unlike its British relative, which rots away in a single winter, six or seven different seasons' crop can be discriminated in the tangled masses of the New Zealand plant. The lowest are in various stages of fragmentary decay, others brittle and brown though sound; another is mottled with grey, but still in patches preserving its green; another bowed and weatherworn, only its tips sere; another dull green and almost perfect; the latest crop of all still erect and topping the growths of former years. Such was the appearance of Tutira in former times.
There was but little room for other plants. In fact, as mountains prove the last resort of peoples driven from their homes by conquest, so in the cliff system of Tutira plants survived which must have otherwise perished in the tyranny of fern. The reader knows the physiography of the station—an alternation of slope and cliff; a drainage system far beneath the level. Over every slope fern lay in swathes: it reached to the base of every cliff, it hung like a fringe over every precipice.
In the vicinity of these huge trees lie, coiled or sprawling on the ground like snakes, lianes, lawyers, vines, and clematis stems. Partly dragged up by the growth to which in youth their shoots have clung, page 100 partly drawn voluntarily towards air and light, their bare rope-like stems strike and chafe, hang and swing, against the boles like loose rigging against a mast. Seen from above, these individual trees, or little companies of trees, can easily be detected by their varying shades of green. About the middle or lower slopes stand venerable brotherhoods of tawa, grey with long pendant lichens, “old man's beard”; there are patches also of deep-green broadleaf (Griselinia littoralis), a species, by-the-bye, never met with on Tutira except far inland.
Another striking characteristic of this intermixed forest is the evenness, as seen from above, of the rolling contour of its ceiling of green. No tree-tops project above the general level; in this effect, however, there is nothing of blighting or blasting. The individual members of the forest community seem to have been born docile, to have acquired ante-natal knowledge of the effects of gales, never to have attempted usurpation of more than their fair share of the open commonwealth of sky. No tops are to be seen “caught and cuffed by the gale,” no solitary shoots eroded and blown bare; the upper surface of the forest is as smooth in its inequalities as downlands in wheat. Conditions are somewhat dissimilar where masses of one species of tree hold undisputed sway, where narrow spurs are maned with one kind of tree as the neck of a hogged pony is stiff with hair. Such groupings of particular trees conform more or less to the shape of the locality on which they grow. They rise cone-shaped on a cone, narrow and elongated on a razor ridge. Beech of two sorts (Fagus fusca and Fagus solandri) are on Tutira the most prominent species growing thus strictly grouped; each possesses inviolate on its own territory whole spurs. Other areas are densely covered with tawhero (Weinmannia racemosa), others again with tall tree-manuka (Leptospernum scoparium). Honeysuckle (Knightia excelsa) is another species which, like the beech, the tawero, and the manuka, seems to revel in dry land, its long-drawn cone rising from the most arid of ridges.
Ferns grow everywhere, clinging like ivy to the rough stems, festooning them with elegant fronds, webbing them with veils of delicate rhizome, overrunning fallen boughs, drooping long languorous growths from matted clumps high overhead. Rooted in massy forks grow epiphytes such as Griselinia lucida, and huge rookeries of pineapple-like astelia. Mats of sweet-scented orchids—Earina mucronata and Earina suavolens—cling with a plexus of roots to suitable sites; often a black mossy lichen exhales in sunshine a delightful violet odour. Except where massed groups of a single species prevail, and the ground beneath is bare and dark, there is a luxuriance of growth due to the great rainfall and the large number of hours of sunshine, almost unknown elsewhere. The edges of the forest exhibit a still more voluptuous profusion of tangled growth, an even thicker profusion than in its shaded heart—clematis, rubus, vine, parsonsia, and native passion-flower competing in the ampler light. Such a forest as this, typical of the North Island, is in truth tropical in all except degree, in all except latitude and longitude. The great rainfall and the full sunshine of the Dominion have created abnormal conditions. Except where massed species prevail, growing in page 102 solitary selfish gloom, an exuberance of life prevails, a luxuriance unknown elsewhere save in the true tropical zone.
The woodlands of Tutira, in contradistinction to the forest described, were confined to gorges deep and damp, gulches such as that of the Maungahinahina, where the upper soils had been washed out, where the marls had become exposed. With the exception of a valley here and there, these woodlands were bare of great trees. Their growth, compared to that of the ranges of the west—for woodland is but a preliminary step towards real forest,—was one destined on eastern Tutira never to progress beyond the initial stage. Vegetation there was dependent on two factors—rate of growth and frequency of landslips. The slower-growing pines, for example, had never time given them to find deep anchorage. Whilst still saplings they were swept to perdition by earth-avalanches following heavy floods. The surface of the ground was renewed too constantly to allow the maturing of any but fast-growing and free-seeding species. In this light bush, tawa (Bielschmiedia tawa), mahoe or hinahina (Melicytus ramiflorus), ngaio (Myoporum lœtum)—unseen on western Tutira except after fires, rangiora (Brachyglottis rangiora), makomako—wineberry (Aristotelia racemosa), fuchsia (Fuchsia excorticata), and koromiko (Veronica salicifolia), were the most common trees and shrubs.
Small groups of the New Zealand palm, nikau (Rhopalostylis sapida), and single plants of karaka (Corynocarpus lœvigatus), grew also in the woods of the extreme eastern corner of the run. Thickets of supplejack (Rhipogonum scandens), entanglements of “lawyer” (rubus sp.), ropes of clematis and vine, were even more dense than in the forest of the west. The soils were richer, the warmth greater. Everywhere, moreover, the ground beneath these woods was ploughed and reploughed by pig in search of drupes, roots, and grubs.
A mere shred of Tutira was under marsh or swamp; such areas page 103 were covered almost entirely with flax (Phormium tenax) and raupo (Typha angustifolia). The height of these plants varied with the drainage; on lands firm and dry each reached a noble growth; on areas of quaking bog they survived, soured and stunted with excessive wet. On dry ground grew also patches of the graceful toe-toe grass (Arundo conspicua). The outer edges of these marshes were rough with nigger's-head (Carex secta) and other coarse sedges and rushes. Sparganium antipodium also grew in certain parts, a plant remarkable in this, that it is the only native which has to my knowledge disappeared during my time on the station.
1 “The Fuegian element of the New Zealand flora,” writes Dr L. Cockayne in the second edition of his delightful ‘New Zealand Plants and their Story,’ “although considerably smaller than the Australian element, has given rise to far more speculation. This arises from the fact that though biological geographers have been willing to erect a ‘land bridge’ between Northern Australia, Malaya, and New Zealand, many have hesitated before in imagination turning into dry land the profound depths of ocean which lie between New Zealand and Antarctica or South America. At the same time the presence of this Fuegian element so far distant from its present home has to be explained.”
Other plant cities of refuge were the rock gardens of the cliffs, the sand gardens of the gritty tops, the bog gardens of the river brim and lake edge. On the dry cliffs survived two native brooms, Carmichaelia odorata and another, Vittadinia australis, Senecio lautus, Stellaria parviflora, Tillæa Sieberiana, Clianthus puniceus—brilliant in its bright scarlet racemes, and at one period, until eaten out by cattle, growing in great quantities on Heru-o-Tureia, and much more rarely on Awa-o-Totara,—Nertera depressa and Geranium sessiliflorum, both Fuegians, Pelargonium australe, Muehlenbeckia complexa, Gaultheria oppositifolia, Angelica rosæfolia, Arthropodium candidum, Daucus brachiatus, Linum monogynum, hill flax (Phormium Cookianum), and “blue grass” (Agropyrum multiflorum).1 On the damp cliffs grew Gnaphalium Keriense, the very charming delicate Calceolaria repens, its white flowers spotted with purple, Euphrasia cuneata, Cladium Sinclairii, Lagenphora Forsteri, the native daisy—Papataniwhaniwha, Arundo fulvida, and other plants.
1 Though now everywhere eaten out by stock, Agropyrum multiflorum was a famous grass in the early days of sheep-farming in Canterbury, its seed being considered equivalent to oats for keeping horses hard and fit. An instance of this is given by Mr George Dennistoun of Peel Forest. He writes: “On one occasion, in the middle sixties, when a neighbour, Mr Fred Kimball of ‘Three Springs,’ was our guest at Haldon in the Mackenzie Country, news arrived that his small son had eaten tutu berries and was dying. ‘Three Springs’ was thirty-eight miles distant by road, or rather by bullock-track. At once my Australian thoroughbred ‘Pickwick’ was run in from the block where the horses fed, country then densely covered with seeding ‘blue grass.’ I told Kimball, who had qualified for a doctor and was a fine rider, not to trouble himself about the horse, but to think only of his boy. I can't remember how long he took, but he said he never thought it possible to have been carried as he was. He saved his boy, and ‘Pickwick,’ after a bucket of gruel, later on took his oats as if he had been called on to do nothing out of the common.” Readers can imagine for themselves what pace a man with medical knowledge, and a father to boot, would ride, knowing the effects of tutu poisoning; they can imagine, too, the racing-stable condition the horse must have been in to have stood without damage a forty-mile gallop over bad roads.
On barren crowns, arid edges, and driest of dry flats subsisted plants such as cabbage-tree (Cordyline australis), Gnaphalium—several species, Celmisia longifolia, Pimelea lævigata, Cyathodes acerosa, Leucopogon fasciculatus, Leucopogon Frazeri, Leptospermum scoparium, Pomaderris phylicæfolia, Echinopogon ovatus, Orthoceras strictum, and Microtis porrifolia.
At a later period, when the power of the bracken was broken, many of these plants, as will be shown, left their cliffs and deserts and rushed like eager settlers on the newly-opened land.
Of the sixty thousand acres of Tutira, fifty-eight, when the station was first stocked, were under bracken, less than fifteen hundred in forest and woodland, less than five hundred in marsh, less than twenty-five in upland meadow, cliff, river-bed, desert, and brims of stagnant creeks. Had, in fact, a narrow slice been shorn from the extreme west and another from the extreme east, Tutira would have been actually what it was for all practical purposes—one vast unbroken sheet of fern. Appended are the names of species noted on the station. I believe that few of the more insignificant plants have been overlooked, but since it is the nature of the writer of this volume to care for small plants rather than trees and shrubs, the list of the latter may not be quite complete.
List of Native Plants on Tutira.
Ranunculaceœ. |
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Magnoliaceœ. | Drimys axillaris. |
Cruciferœ. |
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Violarieœ. |
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Pittosporeœ. |
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Caryophylleœ. | Stellaria parviflora. |
Portulaceœ. | Montia fontana. |
Hypericineœ. | Hypericum gramineum. |
Malvaceœ. | Hoheria populnea. |
Tiliaceœ. |
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Lineœ. | Linum monogynum. |
Geraniaceœ. |
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Olacineœ. | Pennantia corymbosa. |
Rhamneœ. | Pomaderris phylicæfolia. |
Sapindaceœ. | Alectryon excelsum. |
Anacardiaceœ. | Corynocarpus lævigata. |
Coriarieœ. |
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Leguminosœ. |
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Rosaceœ. |
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Saxifrageœ. |
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Crassulaceœ. | Tillæa Sieberiana. |
Droseraceœ. |
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Halorageœ. |
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Myrtaceœ. |
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Onagrarieœ. |
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Cornaceœ. |
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Rubiaceœ. |
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Compositœ. |
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Compositœ—(contd.) |
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Myrsineœ. |
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Oleaceœ. | Olea lanceolata. |
Scrophularineœ. |
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Thymelœaceœ. |
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Loranthaceœ. | Tupeia antartica (twice noticed on Leptospermum scoparium). |
Urticaceœ. |
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Cupuliferœ. |
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Coniferœ. |
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Palmœ. | Rhopalostylis sapida. |
Pandaneœ. | Freycinetia Banksii. |
Typhaceœ. |
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Naiadaceœ. |
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Restiaceœ. | Leptocarpus simplex (edge of lake). |
Cyperaceœ. |
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Salviniaceœ. | Azolla rubra. |
Lycopodiaceœ. |
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Orchideœ. |
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Irideœ. |
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Liliaceœ. |
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Juncaceœ. |
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Myoporineœ. | Myoporum lætum. |
Labiatœ. | Mentha Cunninghamii. |
Plantagineœ. | Plantago Raoulii. |
Illecebraceœ. | Scleranthus biflorus. |
Polygonaceœ. |
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Piperaceœ. | Piper excelsum. |
Monimiaceœ. |
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Laurineœ. | Beilschmiedia Tawa. |
Proteaceœ. | Knightia excelsa. |
Apocynaceœ. |
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Loganiaceœ. | Geniostoma ligustrifolium. |
Gentianeœ. | Gentiana Grisebachii. |
Convolvulaceœ. |
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Solanaceœ. |
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Campanulaceœ. |
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Ericaceœ. |
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Passifloreœ. | Passiflora tetrandra. |
Epacrideœ. |
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Umbelliferœ. |
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Araliaceœ. |
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Gramineœ. |
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Gramineœ—(contd.) |
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