Part 1 (2/2)
Photo by MORRIS, Dunedin.]
As a rule the lower part of the trunks is branchless; stems rise up like tall pillars in long colonnades. But this does not mean that they are bare. Climbing ferns, lichens, pendant gra.s.ses, air-plants, and orchids drape the columns. Tough lianas swing in air: coiling roots overspread the ground. Bushes, shrubs, reeds and ferns of every size and height combine to make a woven thicket, filling up and even choking the s.p.a.ces between trunk and trunk. Supple, snaky vines writhe amid the foliage, and bind the undergrowth together.
The forest trees are evergreens, and even in mid-winter are fresh-looking. The glowing autumnal tints of English woods are never theirs; yet they show every shade of green, from the light of the puriri to the dark of the totara, from the bronze-hued willow-like leaves of the tawa to the vivid green of the matai, or the soft golden-green of the drooping rimu. Then, though the ground-flowers cannot compare in number with those of England or Australia,[1]
the Islands are the chosen land of the fern, and are fortunate in flowering creepers, shrubs, and trees. There are the koromiko bush with white and purple blossoms, and the white convolvulus which covers whole thickets with blooms, delicate as carved ivory, whiter than milk. There are the starry clematis, cream-coloured or white, and the manuka, with tiny but numberless flowers. The yellow kowhai, seen on the hillsides, shows the russet tint of autumn at the height of spring-time. Yet the king of the forest flowers is, perhaps, the crimson, feathery rata. Is it a creeper, or is it a tree? Both opinions are held; both are right. One species of the rata is an ordinary climber; another springs sometimes from the ground, sometimes from the fork of a tree into which the seed is blown or dropped.
Thence it throws out long rootlets, some to earth, others which wrap round the trunk on which it is growing. Gradually this rata becomes a tree itself, kills its supporter, and growing round the dead stick, ends in almost hiding it from view.
[Footnote 1: The Alps, however, show much floral beauty, and the ground-flowers of the Auckland Islands, an outlying group of New Zealand islets, impressed the botanist Kirk as unsurpa.s.sed in the South Temperate Zone.]
In the month of February, when the rata flowers in the Alps, there are valleys which are ablaze for miles with
”Flowers that with one scarlet gleam Cover a hundred leagues, and seem To set the hills on fire.”
But the most gorgeous of all flowering trees, as distinguished from creepers, is the sea-loving pohutu kawa. When the wind is tossing its branches the contrast is startling between its blood-red flowers and the dark upper side and white, downy under side of its leaves.
Like the Australians, New Zealand Colonists call their forest ”bush.”
What in England might be called bush or brushwood is called ”scrub” in the Colonies.
The wood of many of the trees is not only useful timber, but when cut and polished is often beautiful in grain. Unhappily, their destruction goes on with rapid strides. The trees, as is usually the case with those the wood of which is hard, grow slowly. They feel exposure to wind, and seem to need the society and shelter of their fellows. It is almost impossible to restore a New Zealand forest when once destroyed.
Then most of the finest trees are found on rich soil. The land is wanted for grazing and cultivation. The settler comes with axe and fire-stick, and in a few hours unsightly ashes and black funereal stumps have replaced the n.o.ble woods which Nature took centuries to grow. No attempt is made to use a great part of the timber. The process is inevitable, and in great part needful, frightfully wasteful as it seems. But the forest reserves of the Colony, large as they are, should be made even more ample. Twelve hundred thousand acres are not enough--as the New Zealanders will regretfully admit when a decade or so hence they begin to import timber instead of exporting it. As for interfering with reserves already made, any legislator who suggests it should propose his motion with a noose round his neck, after the laudable custom followed in a certain cla.s.sic republic.
New Zealand is by no means a flat country, though there are in it some fair-sized plains, one of which--that of Canterbury--is about as flat a stretch of one hundred miles as is to be found in the world. On the whole, however, both North and South Islands are lands of the mountain and the flood, and not only in this, but in the contour of some of their peaks and coast-line, show more than a fanciful resemblance to the west of Scotland. But the New Zealand mountains are far loftier than anything in the British Islands. The rocky coasts as a rule rise up steeply from the ocean, standing out in many places in bold bluffs and high precipices. The seas round are not shallow, dull, or turbid, but deep, blue, wind-stirred, foam-flecked, and more often than not lit by brilliant suns.h.i.+ne. The climate and colouring, too, are not only essentially un-English, but differ very widely in different parts of the Islands. For New Zealand, though narrow, has length, stretching through 13 degrees of lat.i.tude, and for something like 1,100 miles from north to south. As might be looked for in a mountainous country, lying in the open ocean, the climate is windy, and except in two or three districts, moist. It is gloriously healthy and briskly cheerful.
Summed up in one word, its prevailing characteristic is light!
Hot as are many summer days, they are seldom sultry enough to breed the heavy, overhanging heat-haze which shrouds the heaven nearer the tropics. Sharp as are the frosts of winter nights in the central and southern part of the South Island, the days even in mid-winter are often radiant, giving seven or eight hours of clear, pleasant suns.h.i.+ne. For the most part the rains are heavy but not prolonged; they come in a steady, business-like downpour, or in sharp, angry squalls; suddenly the rain ceases, the clouds break, and the sun is s.h.i.+ning from a blue sky. Fogs and mists are not unknown, but are rare and pa.s.sing visitors, do not come to stay, and are not brown and yellow in hue but more the colour of a clean fleece of wool. They do not taste of cold smoke, gas, sulphur, or mud. High lying and ocean-girt, the long, slender islands are lands of suns.h.i.+ne and the sea. It is not merely that their coast-line measures 4,300 miles, but that they are so shaped and so elevated that from innumerable hilltops and mountain summits distant glimpses may be caught of the blue salt water. From the peak of Aorangi, 12,350 feet in air, the Alpine climber Mannering saw not only the mantle of clouds which at that moment covered the western sea twenty miles away, but a streak of blue ocean seventy miles off near Hokitika to the north-west, and by the hills of Bank's Peninsula to the north-east, a haze which indicated the Eastern Ocean. Thus, from her highest peak, he looked right across New Zealand. The Dutch, then, its discoverers, were not so wrong in naming it Zealand or Sea-land.
Next to light, perhaps the chief characteristic of the country and its climate is variety. Thanks to its great length the north differs much from the south. Southland is as cool as northern France, with an occasional southerly wind as keen as Kingsley's wild north-easter. But in gardens to the north of Auckland I have stood under olive trees laden with berries. Hard by were orange trees, figs, and lemon trees in full bearing. Not far off a winding tidal creek was fringed with mangroves. Exotic palm trees and the cane-brake will grow there easily. All over the North Island, except at high alt.i.tudes, and in the more sheltered portions of the South Island, camellias and azaleas bloom in the open air. The grape vine bids fair to lead to wine-making in both islands--unless the total abstainers grow strong enough to put their foot on the manufacture of alcohol in any form in an already distinctly and increasingly sober Colony.
But in New Zealand not only is the north in marked contrast with the south, but the contrast between the east and west is even more sharply defined. As a rule the two coasts are divided by a broad belt of mountainous country. The words ”chain” and ”spine” are misnomers, at any rate in the South Island, inasmuch as they are not sufficiently expressive of breadth. The rain-bringing winds in New Zealand blow chiefly from the north-west and south-west. The moisture-laden clouds rolling up from the ocean gather and condense against the western flanks of the mountains, where an abundant rainfall has nourished through ages past an unbroken and evergreen forest. Nothing could well be more utterly different than these matted jungles of the wet west coast--with their prevailing tint of rich dark green, their narrow, rank, moist valleys and steep mountain sides--and the eastern scenery of the South Island. The sounds or fiords of the south-west are perhaps the loveliest series of gulfs in the world. Inlet succeeds inlet, deep, calm, and winding far in amongst the steep and towering mountains. The lower slopes of these are clothed with a thick tangle of forest, where foliage is kept eternally fresh and vivid by rain and mist. White torrents and waterfalls everywhere seam the verdure and break the stillness.
Cross to the east coast.
Scarcely is the watershed pa.s.sed when the traveller begins to enter a new landscape and a distinct climate. The mountains, stripped of their robe of forest, seem piled in ruined, wasting heaps, or stand out bleak and bare-ribbed,
”The skeletons of Alps whose death began Far in the mult.i.tudinous centuries.”
Little is left them but a kind of dreary grandeur. The suns.h.i.+ne falls on patches of gleaming snow and trailing mist, and lights up the grey crags which start out like mushrooms on the barren slopes. On all sides streams tear down over beds of the loose s.h.i.+ngle, of which they carry away thousands of tons winter after winter. Their brawling is perhaps the only sound you will hear through slow-footed afternoons, save, always, the whistle or sighing of the persistent wind. A stunted beech bush clothes the spurs here and there, growing short and thick as a fleece of dark wool. After a storm the snow will lie powdering the green beech trees, making the rocks gleam frostily and sharpening the savage ridges till they look like the jagged edges of stone axes.
Only at nightfall in summer do the mountains take a softer aspect.
Then in the evening stillness the great outlines show majesty; then in the silence after sunset rivers, winding among the ranges in many branches over broad, stony beds, fill the shadowy valleys with their hoa.r.s.e murmur.
To the flock-owner, however, this severe region is what the beautiful West is not--it is useful. Sheep can find pasture there. And as the mountains decline into hills, and the hills into downs and flats, the covering of herbage becomes less and less scanty. When the colonists came to the east coast, they found plains and dales which were open, gra.s.sy, almost treeless. Easy of access, and for the most part fertile, they were an ideal country for that unaesthetic person, the practical settler. Flocks and herds might roam amongst the pale tussock gra.s.s of the slopes and bottoms without fear either of man, beast, climate, or poisonous plant.[1] A few wooden buildings and a certain extent of wire fencing represented most of the initial expenses of the pioneer. Pastoral settlement speedily overran such a land, followed more slowly and partially by agriculture. The settler came, not with axe and fire to ravage and deform, but as builder, planter and gardener. Being in nineteen cases out of twenty a Briton, or a child of one, he set to work to fill this void land with everything British which he could transport or transplant His gardens were filled with the flowers, the vegetables, the fruit trees of the old land. The oak, the elm, the willow, the poplar, the spruce, the ash grew in his plantations. His cattle were Shorthorns, Herefords, and Devons. His farm horses were of the best Clydesdale and Suffolk Punch blood. The gra.s.ses they fed upon were mixtures of c.o.c.ks-foot, timothy, rye-gra.s.s, and white clover. When it was found that the red clover would not flourish for want of penetrating insects, the humble bee was imported, and with compete success, as many a field now ruddy with crimson blossom testifies. The common English bee is found wild in the forest, where it hives in hollow trees, and robs its compet.i.tors--the honey-eating native birds--of much of their food.
The hedges round the fields aforesaid are also English, but with a difference. The stunted furze which beautifies English commons is at the other end of the earth a hedge plant, which makes a thick barrier from five to eight feet high, and, with its sweet-smelling blooms, has made the New Zealand fields ”green pictures set in frames of gold.”
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