[CHAPTER VI.]
OUR NATURALIST'S NOTE-BOOK.
"It is impossible to imagine, in the wildest and most picturesque walks of Nature, a sight more sublime and majestic, or which can more forcibly challenge the admiration of the traveller, than a New Zealand forest,"—writes an early voyager to this country. From the first, those who visited these shores were struck with the extent and beauty of our forests, the size of the trees, and the wealth of the vegetation. And, at the present day, the emigrant from Scotland or England, brought here into the depths of the bush, fails not to feel his inmost nature responding to the glory and the grandeur of the scenery.
The woodlands of Northern New Zealand may be divided into two general classes, the heavy bush and the light bush. The first is the true primeval forest, the growth, probably, of two or three thousand years. This is by far the most abundant and extensive of the two. There is nothing in Great Britain to afford comparison with it.
The light bush, on the other hand, is not dissimilar to a very wild and luxuriant English wood, if one excepts the difference of the vegetation. It fills up the gullies, and covers the hill-sides, where Maori cultivation once occupied the ground. It is by no means so extensive as the heavy bush, but may be said to fringe it here and there, and to border once populous rivers. These copsewoods spring up very rapidly. Light bush that is only forty years old will rival English woods that have stood a century, in the relative size of the trees. The jungle is so dense that it is often almost impervious to passage altogether, until the axe has cleared a road. It has a rich and fresh appearance when looked at as a whole, a verdancy and wealth of varying tints, a general beauty that seems to make our name for it appear an ill-chosen one; for we generally call the light bush "scrub."
The heavy bush, in these northern districts, is divisible into two kinds. There is the kauri bush and the mixed bush. The first, as its name implies, is forest where the kauri grows alone, or, at least, preponderates. It has already been described. It is something solemn and tremendous in the last degree, grand and gloomy, and even awful. There are but few trees produced anywhere in the world that can rival the mammoth kauri in bulk. When we consider the closeness with which the trees stand, the uniform mightiness of their endless ranks, stretching on over hill and dale for many a mile, it is not easy to say where we may look to find anything to match or compare with kauri bush.
The mixed bush is very different. Here one is in an actual land of enchantment. Uniformity is gone; unending variety is in place of it. The eye is almost wearied with delight, wonder, and admiration at all around, for there is ever something new, something to prevent the sense of monotony growing up in the mind.
The trees are not of one size, any more than of one kind. Their maximum girth and height fall considerably below that of the largest kauri. Still, one may see kahikatea, kawaka, kotukutuku, matai, miro, pukatea, puriri, rata, rimu, taraire, totara, and many another, whose girth may be as much as thirty feet and more, perhaps; and that may attain a hundred feet or more of height before "heading." Nor are these trees but so many columns. There are trees that branch all round with great domes of foliage. There are some that send several huge limbs upshooting to the sky. There are crooked trees, gnarled trees, bare trees and richly covered ones, leaning trees and fallen trees, a confusion and profusion of arboreal forms.
There is exuberant vegetation above, around, below. Waist-deep in a rich, rare fernery you stand, and, if you have an artistic soul, gaze rapturously about you. From the heights you peer down into the gullies, look abroad over distant sweeps of river, glance through vistas of greenery, over panoramas of wild woodland beauty, carrying your sight away to the far-off hills bathed in sunshine; and all is mantled with the glorious woods.