THE FOREST OF THE PAST 51 



stock were banished, the woodlands would re-establish themselves. 

 Twenty-five years would see the surface, so painfully grassed, once again 

 in fern ; one hundred would see forest reclothe the countryside. Within 

 my own period, an example of this general tendency has presented 

 itself. In '83 a part of the run known as the " Sandhills " had been 

 fire-swept. It lay black and bare except for one patch of five or six 

 acres of fern. This oasis of ravine or dene, evidently particularly damp 

 even in summer heat, lay on steep slopes facing south-east, but with no 

 other apparent defence from the fire which had desolated the sur- 

 rounding lands. Unscorched in ; 83, it has since then again and 

 again escaped periodical fires purposely lighted. In forty seasons it has 

 been transformed from fern to scrub and from scrub to light bush. It 

 contained in the 'eighties a great deal of tall fern together with a 

 proportion of small tutu (Coriaria ruscifolia], koromiko ( Veronica solid- 

 folia), and manuka (Leptospermum scoparium). Later, appeared slender 

 matapo (Pittosporum tenuifolium) and makomako (Aristotelia racemosa), 

 fuchsia (Fuchsia excortica), hinahina (Melicytus ramiflorus), kowhai 

 (Sophora tetraptera)> and rangiora (Br achy glottis Rangiora) ; the 

 original shrubby tutu and koromiko grew almost into trees ; the manuka 

 stiffened into poles ; tree-ferns, lawyers (Rubas australis), and supple- 

 jacks (Rhipogonum scandens) appeared as under scrub, the fronds 

 of the stifled bracken grew further apart. Seedlings and saplings of 

 the larger forest species, white pine (Podocarpus dacrydioides), rimu 

 (Dacrydium cupressum), and totara (Podocarpus Totara), established 

 themselves. With the lapse of another twenty-five years light bush, 

 the precursor of forest, would have possessed the little dene. 



Tutira, then, has been at one period entirely covered with forest, 

 bush of a lesser size and more ephemeral nature possessing the eastern 

 coastal belt, timber of great girth and of a more durable character 

 flourishing throughout the trough and western portion of the station. 

 Consequent on forest fires a gradual general retreat inland of these 

 woodlands has been traced. For two or three centuries maybe eastern 

 Tutira has been bare of trees ; on the other hand, in the central run a 

 patch of one thousand acres has been destroyed only as recently as the 

 'seventies. On the far west, relics of the ancient primeval forest still 

 grow green. 



