Members of very different families, the pen-wiper plant and the vegetable sheep are excellently described by their names. That is more than can be said for many of our forest trees. One of these, the aké, has leaves so viscous that in sandy or dusty spots these become too thickly coated with dirt to allow the tree to grow to any size. As a variation the para-para tree has normal leaves, but the skin of its fruit is so sticky that not only insects but small birds have been found glued thereto. A rather common trick of our trees is to change the form of their leaves as they grow old. The slim, straight lance-wood, for instance, will for many years be clothed with long, narrow, leathery-looking leaves, armed with hooks, growing from the stem and pointing stiffly downwards. So long, narrow, and rigid are they that the whole plant stands like an inverted umbrella stripped of its covering. Later in life the leaves lose both their hooks and their odd shape, and the lance-wood ceases to look like a survival from the days of the pterodactyl. At no time can it look much stranger than two species of dracophyllum, the nei-nei and the grass-tree. Save for the extremities, the limbs of these are naked. They reserve their energies for tufts at the tips. In one species these are like long wisps of grass; in the other they curve back like a pine-apple’s, and from among them springs a large red flower having the shape of a toy tree. Even the nei-nei is eclipsed by the tanekaha, or celery pine, which contrives to be a very handsome tree without bearing any leaves whatever; their place is taken by branchlets, thickened and fan-shaped. The raukawa has leaves scented so sweetly that the Maori women used to rub their skins with them as a perfume. Another more eccentric plant is scentless by day, but smells agreeably at night-time. Indeed, both by day and night the air of the forest is pleasant to the nostrils. A disagreeable exception among our plants is the coprosma, emphatically called fœtidissima, concerning which bushmen, entangled in its thickets, have used language which might turn bullock-drivers green with envy.
AUCKLAND
The navigators who discovered or traded with our islands while they were still a No Man’s Land have recorded their admiration of the timber of our forests. The tall sticks of kauri and kahikatea, with their scores of feet of clean straight wood, roused the sailors’ enthusiasm. It seemed to them that they had chanced upon the finest spars in the world. And for two generations after Captain Cook, trees picked out in the Auckland bush, and roughly trimmed there, were carried across on the decks of trading schooners to Sydney, and there used by Australian shipbuilders. In the year 1819 the British Government sent a store-ship, the Dromedary, to the Bay of Islands for a cargo of kauri spars. They were to be suitable for top-masts, so to be from seventy-four to eighty-four feet long and from twenty-one to twenty-three inches thick. After much chaffering with the native chiefs the spars were cut and shipped, and we owe to the expedition an interesting book by an officer on board the Dromedary. Our export of timber has always been mainly from Auckland, and for many years has been chiefly of kauri logs or sawn timber. There has been some export of white pine to Australia for making butter-boxes; but the kauri has been the mainstay of the timber trade oversea. Other woods are cut and sawn in large quantities, but the timber is consumed within the colony. How large the consumption is may be seen from the number of saw-mills at work—411—and their annual output, which was 432,000,000 superficial feet last year. Add to this a considerable amount cut for firewood, fences, and rough carpentering, which does not pass through the mills. And then, great as is the total quantity made use of, the amount destroyed and wasted is also great. Accidental fires, sometimes caused by gross carelessness, ravage thousands of acres. “A swagger will burn down a forest to light his pipe,” said Sir Julius Vogel, and the epigram was doubtless true of some of the swag-carrying tribe. But the average swagger is a decent enough labourer on the march in search of work, and not to be classed with the irreclaimable vagrant called tramp in Britain. In any case the swagger was never the sole or main offender where forest fires were concerned. It would be correct to say that gum-diggers sometimes burn down a forest in trying to clear an acre of scrub. But bush fires start up from twenty different causes. Sparks from a saw-mill often light up a blaze which may end in consuming the mill and its surroundings. I have heard of a dogmatic settler who was so positive that his grass would not burn that he threw a lighted match into a tuft of it by way of demonstration. A puff of wind found the little flame, and before it was extinguished it had consumed four hundred acres of yellow but valuable pasture.
And then there is the great area deliberately cut and burned to make way for grass. Here the defender of tree-life is faced with a more difficult problem. The men who are doing the melancholy work of destruction are doing also the work of colonisation. As a class they are, perhaps, the most interesting and deserving in colonial life. They are acting lawfully and in good faith. Yet the result is a hewing down and sweeping away of beauty, compared with which the conquests of the Goths and Vandals were conservative processes. For those noted invaders did not level Rome or Carthage to the ground: they left classic architecture standing. To the lover of beautiful Nature the work of our race in New Zealand seems more akin to that of the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor, when they swept away population, buildings and agriculture, and Byzantine city and rural life together, in order to turn whole provinces into pasture for their sheep. Not that my countrymen are more blind to beauty than other colonists from Europe. It is mere accident which has laid upon them the burden of having ruined more natural beauty in the last half-century than have other pioneers. The result is none the less saddening. When the first white settlers landed, the islands were supposed still to contain some thirty million acres of forest. The Maori had done a share of destruction by reckless or accidental burning. Other causes, perhaps, had helped to devastate such tracts as the Canterbury plains and the kauri gum-fields. But enough, and more than enough, was left; indeed the bush seemed the chief barrier to rapid settlement. The havoc wrought by careless savages was a trifle compared with the wholesale destruction brought about by our utilising of the forests and the soil. Quod non fecerunt Barbari fecere Barberini. To-day we are told that the timber still standing cannot last our saw-mills more than two generations, and that a supply which was estimated at forty-three thousand million feet in 1905 had shrunk to thirty-six thousand million feet in 1907. The acreage of our forests must be nearer fifteen than twenty millions now. Some of this, covering, as it does, good alluvial soil, must go; but I am far from being alone in believing that four-fifths of it should be conserved, and that where timber is cut the same precautions should be insisted on as in Germany, France, India, and some intelligent portions of North America. Within the last two years great floods in Auckland and Hawke’s Bay, and, farther south, two summers hot and dry beyond precedent, seem to point the moral and strengthen the case for making a courageous stand on behalf of the moiety we have left of the woods that our fathers thought illimitable.
MOUNT EGMONT
Something has already been done. Forty years ago Thomas Potts, naturalist and politician, raised his voice in the parliamentary wilderness; and in the next decade a Premier, Sir Julius Vogel, came forward with an official scheme of conservation which would have been invaluable had he pressed it home. Since then enlightened officials, like the late Surveyor-General, Mr. Percy Smith, have done what they could. From time to time reserves have been made which, all too small as they are, now protect some millions of acres. In the rainier districts most of this is not in great danger from chance fires. Nor is it always and everywhere true that the forest when burned does not grow again. It can and will do so, if cattle and goats are kept out of it. The lavish beauty of the primeval forest may not return, but that is another matter. The cry that Government reservation only saves trees from the axe to keep them for the fire may be dismissed as a counsel of despair, or—sometimes—as inspired by the saw-miller and land-grabber. Of late years, too, both Government and public are waking up to the wisdom of preserving noted and beautiful scenes. Many years ago the settlers of Taranaki set an example by reserving the upper and middle slopes of their Fusiyama, Mount Egmont. Long stretches of the draped cliffs of Wanganui River have been made as safe as law can make them, though some still remain in danger, and I am told that at Taumaranui, on the upper river, the hum of the saw-mills is ever in your ears. Societies for preserving scenery are at work elsewhere, and the Parliament has passed an Act and established a Board for the purpose of making scenic reserves. Twenty-five thousand acres have lately been set aside on the Board’s advice, and the area will, I assume, be added to yearly.
Now and again, in dry, windy summers, the forest turns upon its destroyers and takes revenge. Dying, it involves their works and possessions in its own fiery death. A bush-fire is a fine sight when seen on windy nights, burning whole hill-sides, crawling slowly to windward, or rushing with the wind in leaping tongues and flakes that fly above the tree-tops. The roar, as of a mighty gale, the spouting and whirling of golden sparks, the hissing of sap and resin, and the glowing heat that may be felt a mile away, join grandly in furious energy. Nothing can be finer than the spectacle, just as nothing can be more dreary than the resulting ruin. A piece of bush accidentally burned has no touch of dignity in its wreck. It becomes merely an ugly and hateful jumble, begrimed, untidy, and unserviceable. A tract that has been cut down and fired deliberately is in a better case. Something more like a clean sweep has been made, and the young grass sprouting up gives promise of a better day. But bush through which fire has run too quickly is often spoiled as forest, without becoming of use to the farmer. The best that can be done when trees are thus scorched is for the saw-miller to pick out the larger timber and separate with his machinery the sound inside from the burned envelope. This he does skilfully enough, and much good wood—especially kauri—is thus saved. The simple-minded settler when selling scorched timber sometimes tries to charge for sound and injured portions alike; but the average saw-miller is a man of experience.
