48 A NEW ZEALAND NATURALIST'S CALENDAR. 



(A. colensoi) grows out in the open ground. Its stern 

 seems to stand a foot or two above ground, but it is really 

 a prostrate species, with a trunk often 10 feet long, but 

 only the upper portion stands erect. 



High up among the hollows on the hillsides are great 

 swathes of the rich but delicate-green fronds of the millfoil 

 fern (Hypolepis millefoliuiii), its fronds cut and crimped 

 into a thousand small segments. One wonders how such a 

 rich and luxurious growth can preserve its beauty and 

 delicacy in such high and exposed situations ; but this 

 fern, like some others of fine texture, dies down in the 

 autumn, leaving a thick mantle of dead fronds to protect 

 the creeping stems during the months of snow and frost, 

 so that the new growth of early summer comes up fresh, 

 soft, and of a vivid green hue. These soft-fronded ferns 

 will not stand the hotter dry air of the northern hills and 

 ranges of this island, and a "nor' wester" shrivels them, 

 but under the "cheerful grey skies" of Otago they thrive 

 to perfection. 



There are usually plenty of flowers on the open hillsides 

 during January. Senecio bellidioides makes the ground 

 gay with its bright dandelion-like flowers, while the com- 

 mon native everlasting Helichrysum bellidioides produces 

 great trusses of small white-bracted blossoms. It troubles 

 some people to use the only names by which so many 

 plants are known, and they are given to carping at them. 

 But seeing that none but botanists have taken the trouble 

 to invent names for them, and that they have done so in 

 accordance with certain simple rules of nomenclature, the 

 cavilling is ungracious. Whenever the poet shall arise who 

 can suggest simple appropriate and euphonious names for 

 all the native plants, names that can be " understanded of 

 the people," then we shall hear him gladly, and perhaps 

 adopt his names. Meanwhile it may simplify these techni- 

 calities to try to arrive at their meaning : thus Bellis is the 

 technical name of the daisy, and bellidioides means '-daisy- 

 like." 



