IV
Acclimatisation

We have wrestled noon to noon
With the Pampas wild cardoon.
With the thistle, and the ti-tree, with the ragwort and the gorse,
We have hacked in wrath and ire
At the great sweet-scented briar.

But 'twas Rubus fruticosus¹that drove us off the course.

Settlers in a new country have all sorts of things to contend against, but for some of their worst troubles they have themselves, or their predecessors, to blame. There was a fine big variegated thistle, for instance, a handsome plant from South America, that some missionary obtained for his garden. It so took charge of the rich delta land, and grew so high and thick, that I have driven down one side of a flat country road without being able to get even a glimpse of a buggy coming up the other. However, the seeds were heavy and without parachutes, and being an annual, it was. in time, got under control.

Gorse, too, which people once tried for hedges, spread so rampantly, shooting its seeds well away from it on a hot day, that a page 30mere hedge soon became a strip a hundred yards or more deep. When I was riding round a friend's run, he pointed out to me such a gorse cover, which he was having eradicated at great expense, with the following remark: "I have read that Linnæus, the great botanist, at his first sight of a field of gorse in flower burst into tears, I don't wonder."

The same friend had cut, on his property, miles of open drains, when someone introduced water-cress, which grew with such rapidity that it choked them all. He then planted willows which so shaded the drains as to settle the watercress trouble, but by and by he found that the repeated cutting of the masses of fast-growing pink willow roots was costing him more than the cress clearing had done. I once saw caught a big trout whose holt had been under such willow roots—he was a bright pink all over!

You never quite know what a thing will do in that genial climate. A friend from New Zealand looking at my Surrey garden the other day, remarked that the common pink oxalis, growing sedately enough with me, was, with him, one of the worst weeds in his garden. He had to put the whole bed through a fine sieve to get rid of it.

Hundreds of rich acres were rendered use-page break

Plate V
Bush Country

Plate V
Fern and Manuka Scrub

page 31less by the common sweet-briar, which grows in huge bushes; but it does not send out suckers and is got rid of as follows: In wet weather, when the ground is soft, a team of bullocks is brought along with a huge chain which is looped round the bush. When bullocks start to pull, they do not strain and struggle like a horse, but slowly and deliberately they lean their great weight forward till the bush, with half a ton of earth to its roots, comes bodily out. It is then stowed aside to dry, and a match in the dry weather will finish the matter.

There was a curious gap in the aboriginal flora of the country, nothing having been developed to fill up the frequently devastated space between the normal level of the rapid streams and high flood mark. Some early settlers or missionaries, it is said, their sailing ship calling at St. Helena on the way out, broke off pieces of the weeping willow over Napoleon's tomb and planted them in their new home, where they grew luxuriantly and to a very large size. With these and other sorts of willows, with tall fescue grass in some places, and common mint in others, the bare spaces mentioned above are now pretty well filled up, and the former loose banks more or less permanently consolidated.

This riverside immigration was all to the page 32good, but pessimists among the sheep-men usually live in a state of nervous apprehension as to some new weed or other that seems inclined to "take charge" and ruin them. Yellow rag-wort, pennyroyal, various thistles, among others, have all had their day as bogies, and have now taken their place as comparatively harmless weeds, only one imported vegetable growth still remaining, in some districts, a permanent menace to sheep farmers, and that is the common blackberry. But this blackberry business is very serious. With its spreading roots and suckers you cannot pull it up, body and breeks, as you can the sweet-briar—it grows pretty near all the year round—birds and mankind spread its seeds everywhere—digging it out is a hopeless job and, any way, ruinously expensive—and though goats might in time destroy it, you cannot fence goats in. So, in land that is too steep and broken to plough, blackberry is king, and the sheep are gradually crowded off. The matter is so serious that I understand the New Zealand Government offers something like £10,000 for a cure, which they do not seem to have much chance of obtaining. Of course, every precaution is taken to prevent its spread from the small infested districts, with the most stringent regulations and penalties, and these, backed page 33by public feeling, will probably prove efficacious, though its eradication when it has really got well hold remains an unsolved problem.

In one district where the land is very light, the settlers, quite lately, whether from love of the beautiful or with ideas as to grouse in the future I know not, planted some heather. I have been told that it did so well that now it has been decided to spend a lot of money in eradicating every plant of it while such a process is, presumably, still possible. Having in mind the difficulty I had on a poor Surrey hill, in keeping my tennis lawn free from heather seedlings, I do not wonder at the settlers' resolution.

Introducing new animals to the country is just as risky. Everyone has heard of the rabbit pest. In our district, though it is free of these animals, you cannot be found with even a tame rabbit of any kind under penalty of £50, and there is a special tax levied to keep up a long rabbit-proof boundary fence, with watchers to patrol it, and also district inspectors. If any trace of rabbit is found, you have, under the most stringent laws, to employ professional rabbiters to get rid of the pest. Unfortunately, if only naturally, the very last thing some of these men desire is complete extermination. In fact, when the page 34little beasts are scarce, actual invention of them is not entirely unknown. A friend of mine in another district, where the count was made by tails, happening one wet day to visit unexpectedly the men's quarters, found an old rabbiter, with scissors and a few whole skins, happily engaged in making tails, a large heap of which lay before him on the floor.

Which brings to mind another incident. The authorities in two adjacent counties, interested in the destruction of hawks, paid for them, one by the head and the other by the claws, with the most satisfactory results to the shooters and poisoners.

Deer of several sorts were introduced years ago, and have done so well that I believe in time they will alter the whole nature of the forest, probably ruining much of its beauty and exterminating a good many varieties of native flora. They are even now a serious pest to many runholders.

The black Indian cricket somehow got to New Zealand, and soon did very serious damage. I have seen fields eaten to bare ground by them, and a collected grass-seed crop that was more crickets than grain. Then the Indian starling or mynah was introduced. As the numbers of this knowing bird very rapidly increased, the crickets as page 35rapidly disappeared, but semi-wild turkeys no longer fattened in flocks on the runs, and even the wild pheasants became very noticeably scarcer, the ever-increasing keenly omnivorous mynahs starving them out. And if you now go out with a gun, you are the centre of a moving ring of gently chattering mynahs, always just out of shot.

Stoats were put down to kill rabbits. Whether they did so or not I do not know, but they soon spread everywhere, and the wood hen, that cannot fly, then became, with other ground birds, increasingly rare, while larks and other European small, birds continued to swarm.

"Acclimatisation" is a very risky business.