New Zealand

by William Pember Reeves

AMONG THE KAURI

I suppose that most New Zealanders, if asked to name the finest trees of their forest, would declare for the kauri and the totara. Some might add the puriri to these. But then the average New Zealander is a practical person and is apt to estimate a forest-tree in terms of sawn timber. Not that a full-grown kauri is other than a great and very interesting tree. Its spreading branches and dark crown of glossy-green leaves, lifted above its fellows of the woodland, like Saul’s head above the people, catch and hold the eye at once. And the great column of its trunk impresses you like the pillar of an Egyptian temple, not by classic grace, but by a rotund bulk, sheer size and weight speaking of massive antiquity. It is not their height that makes even the greatest of the kauri tribe remarkable, for one hundred and fifty feet is nothing extraordinary. But their picked giants measure sixty-six feet in circumference, with a diameter that, at least in one case, has reached twenty-four. Moreover, the smooth grey trunks rise eighty or even a hundred feet without the interruption of a single branch. And when you come to the branches, they are as large as trees: some have been measured and found to be four feet through. Then, though the foliage is none too dense, each leaf is of a fair size. From their lofty roof above your head to the subsoil below your feet, all is odorous of resin. Leaves and twigs smell of it; it forms lumps in the forks, oozes from the trunk and mixes with the earth—the swelling humus composed of flakes of decayed bark dropped through the slow centuries. There are still kauri pines in plenty that must have been vigorous saplings when William the Norman was afforesting south-western Hampshire. The giants just spoken of are survivors from ages far more remote. For they may have been tall trees when cedars were being hewn on Lebanon for King Solomon’s temple. And then the kauri has a pathetic interest: it is doomed. At the present rate of consumption the supply will not last ten years. Commercially it is too valuable to be allowed to live undisturbed, and too slow of growth to make it worth the while of a money-making generation to grow it. Even the young “rickers” are callously slashed and burned away. Who regards a stem that may be valuable a quarter of a century hence, or a seedling that will not be worth money during the first half of the twentieth century? So the kauri, like the African elephant, the whale, and the bison, seems likely to become a rare survival. It will be kept to be looked at in a few State reserves. Then men may remember that once upon a time virtually all the town of Auckland was built of kauri timber, and that Von Hochstetter, riding through a freshly burned kauri “bush,” found the air charged with a smell as of frankincense and myrrh.

Nor is the totara other than a king of the woods, albeit a lesser monarch than the giant. Its brown shaggy trunk looks best, to my thinking, when wrapped in a rough overcoat of lichens, air-lilies, climbing ferns, lianas, and embracing rootlets. Such a tree, from waist to crown, is often a world of shaggy greenery, where its own bristling, bushy foliage may be lit up by the crimson of the florid rata, or the starry whiteness of other climbers. The beauty of the totara is not external only. Its brown wood is handsome, and a polished piece of knotty or mottled totara almost vies with mottled kauri in the cabinet-maker’s esteem.

For utility no wood in the islands, perhaps, surpasses that of the puriri, the teak of the country. One is tempted to say that it should be made a penal offence to burn a tree at once so serviceable and so difficult to replace. A tall puriri, too, with its fresh-green leaves and rose-tinted flowers, is a cheering sight, especially when you see, as you sometimes do, healthy specimens which have somehow managed to survive the cutting down and burning of the other forest trees, and stand in fields from which the bush has been cleared away.

POHUTUKAWA IN BLOOM, WHANGAROA HARBOUR

Yet none of the three trees named seems to me to equal in beauty or distinction certain other chieftains of the forest. Surely the cedar-like rimu—silvæ filia nobilis,—with its delicate drooping foliage and air of slender grace, and the more compact titoki with polished curving leaves and black-and-crimson berries, are not easily to be matched. And surpassing even these in brilliance and strangeness are a whole group of the iron-heart family, ratas with flowers blood-red or white, and their cousin the “spray-sprinkled” pohutu-kawa. The last-named, like the kauri, puriri, tawari, and tarairi, is a northerner, and does not love the South Island, though a stray specimen or two have been found in Banks’ Peninsula. But the rata, though shunning the dry mid-eastern coast of the South Island, ventures much nearer the Antarctic. The variety named lucida grows in Stewart Island, and forms a kind of jungle in the Auckland Isles, where, beaten on its knees by the furious gales, it goes down, so to speak, on all fours, and, lifting only its crown, spreads in bent thickets in a climate as wet and stormy as that of the moors of Cumberland.

The rata of the south would, but for its flowers, be an ordinary tree enough, very hard, very slow in growing, and carrying leaves somewhat like those of the English box-tree. But when in flower in the later summer, it crowns the western forests with glory, and lights up mountain passes and slopes with sheets of crimson. The splendour of the flower comes not from its petals, but from what Kirk the botanist calls “the fiery crimson filaments of its innumerable stamens,” standing as they do in red crests, or hanging downward in feathery fringes. To win full admiration the rata must be seen where it spreads in profusion, staining cliffs, sprinkling the dark-green tree-tops with blood, and anon seeming in the distance to be massed in cushions of soft red. Trees have been found bearing golden flowers, but such are very rare.

The rata lucida does not climb other trees. Another and even brighter species, the florid rata, is a climbing plant, and so are two white-flowered kinds named albiflora and scandens, both beautiful in their way, but lacking the distinction of the blood-hued species, for white is only too common a colour in our forest flora. The florid rata, on the other hand, is perhaps the most brilliant of the tribe. Winding its way up to the light, it climbs to the green roof of the forest, and there flaunts a bold scarlet like the crest of some gay bird of the Tropics. It is a snake-like vine, and, vine like, yields a pale rose-tinted drink, which with a little make-believe may be likened to rough cider. Rata wine, however, is not crushed from grapes, but drawn from the vine-stem. Mr. Laing states that as much as a gallon and a half of liquid has dripped from a piece of the stem four feet long, after it had been cut and kept dry for three weeks.