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The Spike or Victoria University College Review June 1925

The Flora of Mount Cook

page 41

The Flora of Mount Cook

Professor Wall is Professor of English at Canterbury College; he is also a botanist of note and a mountaineer. He is therefore well qualified to write on such a subject as the one he has taken, and he has acquitted himself well.

The booklet upens with an indication of the field— "... the whole of the Sealey Range and Sebastopol, Sawyer's Creek, the margins of the three great glaciers and the ranges above them; the Copeland Range, the Mount Cook Range, and the Malte Brun Range." There follow sections on the relation of the flora to the New Zealand Alpine Flora, Relation to Present World Flora, Relation to Ancient World Flora; then on History, Attractions, Adaptations; and then a fine chapter on the Plant Communities. The remainder of the booklet, rather more than half, deals with an examination of the Flora as it may be carried out in ten excursions round about The Hermitage, and concludes with a list of the plants arranged under their natural orders.

Professor Wall has had regard to the reader that finds botanical names troublesome, and he has wisely used popular names very freely. Sometimes, indeed, he seems to have gone a little too far in this direction and ambiguity results. Thus, p. 21, he speaks of Mountain Pine as a member of shrub assemblages in the neighbourhood of the Hermitage. It is not clear what is meant by Mountain Pine. If Dacrydium intermedium is meant it is strange that the plant is omitted from the list at the end of the booklet. The same remark applies to Dacrydium Bidwillii, although a photograph, on page 14, is given of this plant on open scrubland near the Hermitage. Nor is Dacrydium laxifolium, the snow rimu, mentioned in the list. Stili, with regard to popular names, it would be better to call Podocarpus nivalis the snow totara than to call it the mountain totara. On page 22 mention is made of the piripiri, or "biddy-biddy." Piripiri is the frequentative of piri, to cling, and is euphonious and expressive. Biddy-biddy means nothing and is ugly. It seems a pity that Professor Wall should dignify such a name by recognising it, and so helping to perpetuate it.

To a very interesting account popular interest might well have been added by a reference here and there to structures such as those by which Piripiri and Uncinia, the hooked sedge, cling to the passing traveller.

On page 27 there is a capital comparison between the break-mg-in of quite new country by pioneers of the human kind and the occupying of new shingle slips by the plants that are fitted for this work, the pioneers in each case becoming replaced by later arrivals that could not have done the original work. But Professor Wall speaks of these new arrivals, who could not by themselves conquer Nature in her obdurate mood, but could only oust those that had conquered her, as being of a higher type. This seems rough on the pioneers, whether plant or human. Better the lot of those earliest plant pioneers that first undertook the subjugation of the land, stepping ashore from their watery home to face the unknown in all its terror. Of them we know nothing, and we cannot inflict upon them slighting page 42 comparison with their own conquerors. They lack the sacred bard and are happy in the lack.

Unwept, the slighted pioneers to Orcus grim pass down:
The Mural Bard, with ringing note, gives higher "forms renown.

Surely it cannot be Science that has thus distorted Professor Wall's sense of moral value; it must be the Humanities.

The booklet is a most useful and a most interesting one, and it is sure to be in great demand by students and by many a visitor that would not call himself a student, but that has the outstanding characteristic of one, in that he wants to know. There are many beautiful illustrations by photographs taken by Professor Algie and other of Professor Wall's aiders and abettors, and by excellent line drawings, not always excellently reproduced, by Miss Edith Wall.