Forest Land.

Canterbury has never been so well supplied with timber as most of the other provinces. Its area of forest land is estimated at about 516,000 acres, though recently some additions have been made to the forest reserves. When the province was first settled, the whole of Banks' Peninsula was thickly wooded, and the early history of the province is largely connected with the vicissitudes of saw-milling there and in the Maori bush, and the Church bush, near Kaiapoi. Now the Kaiapoi bushes are extinct, and the Peninsula is nearly cleared. But there is still some matai and totara on the Peninsula, as also in the Mount Peel and Waimate districts, where a little rimu is still found. Along the head-waters of the Hurunui, Waiau, Ashley, Waimakariri, Rakaia, and Waitaki, there is a large amount of timber, mostly native birch, or, more strictly, beech; and this tree is found, almost to the exclusion of others, in the Kowai and Otarama bushes, near Springfield. The Oxford bush, in North Canterbury, once the most picturesque natural bush in the province, is now mostly swept away by fires and sawmills, but there is some rimu, totara, and matai still standing. The Riccarton bush, still preserved on the Deans' estate at Riccarton, is an interesting relie of the days when Canterbury was yet a wilderness. Though the forest land is being rapidly cleared, the mills at Mount Somers (Alford Forest), Little River, and Oxford still put through a good deal of timber.