Pandanus trees are grown in the bush and not in the gardens. The ine which is a large form ([Plate 80]), is always grown at a height of not less than 5,000 feet; but there is a smaller one which is grown by a river or stream. The malage is always grown in the valleys near brooks and rivers.
As regards the gardens generally, they may be roughly divided into sweet potato gardens and yam gardens. In the former are also grown bananas, sugar-cane, beans, pumpkin, cucumber and maize; and in the latter taro and beans, and the reed plant with the asparagus flavour to which I have already referred. The general tending of the bananas and sugar-canes, and to a certain extent the yams, is done by men; but in other respects the garden produce is looked after by women, who also attend to the weeding and keeping of the gardens clean, the men looking after the fences.
Having planted a certain crop in a garden, they let it go on until it is exhausted, the period for this being different for different crops; but afterwards they never again plant the same crop in the same garden. When a crop is exhausted, they may possibly use the same garden for some other purpose; but as a rule they do not do so, except as regards the use of old potato gardens for banana and sugar-cane. When fresh gardens are wanted, fresh portions of bush are cleared; and the old deserted gardens are quickly re-covered by nature with fresh bush, the growth of vegetation being very rapid. Most of the gardens are bush gardens, and, though these may sometimes be close to the village, you do not find a regular system of gardens within the village clearing, as you do in the Mekeo district, the situations of the villages being indeed hardly adapted for this.
[1] I have never seen the animal called the “Macgregor bear,” and I do not know what it is. The Fathers assured me it was a bear; but in view of the great unlikelihood of this, I consulted the authorities at the Natural History Museum, and they think it is probably one of the marsupials. It is named after Sir William Macgregor. It is found in the mountains, where the forest is very thick.
[2] Compare the Motumotu (Toaripi) practice of rubbing the dogs’ mouths with a special plant, referred to by Chalmers (Pioneering in New Guinea, p. 305).
[3] The birds of paradise which dance in trees include, I was told, what the Fathers called the “Red,” the “Blue,” the “Black,” the “Superb” and the “Six-feathered.” Those which dance on the ground include the “Magnificent.”
[4] In Mekeo the weir is made with wicker-work, at the openings in which basket fish-traps are placed.
[5] Pioneering in New Guinea, pp. 3 and 4.
[6] Dr. Stapf tells me that taro is usually propagated by means of tubers or division of crowns, that is that either the whole tuber is planted or it is cut up, as potatoes are done, into pieces, each of which has an eye, and each of which is planted. It would appear that the Mafulu method, as explained to me, amounts to much the same thing, the only difference being that instead of planting a crown, or a piece with an eye from which a fresh shoot will proceed, they let that shoot first grow into a young plant and then transplant the latter.