100 TUTIRA 



partly drawn voluntarily towards air and light, their bare rope-like stems 

 strike and chafe, hang and swing, against the boles like loose rigging 

 against a mast. Seen from above, these individual trees, or little 

 companies of trees, can easily be detected by their varying shades of 

 green. About the middle or lower slopes stand venerable brotherhoods 

 of tawa, grey with long pendant lichens, "old man's beard"; there are 

 patches also of deep-green broadleaf (Griselinia littoralis), a species, 

 by-the-bye, never met with on Tutira except far inland. 



Another striking characteristic of this intermixed forest is the 

 evenness, as seen from above, of the rolling contour of its ceiling of 

 green. No tree-tops project above the general level ; in this effect, 

 however, there is nothing of blighting or blasting. The individual 

 members of the forest community seem to have been born docile, to 

 have acquired ante-natal knowledge of the effects of gales, never to 

 have attempted usurpation of more than their fair share of the open 

 commonwealth of sky. No tops are to be seen "caught and cuffed by 

 the gale," no solitary shoots eroded and blown bare ; the upper surface 

 of the forest is as smooth in its inequalities as downlands in wheat. 

 Conditions are somewhat dissimilar where masses of one species of tree 

 hold undisputed sway, where narrow spurs are maned with one kind 

 of tree as the neck of a hogged pony is stiff with hair. Such groupings 

 of particular trees conform more or less to the shape of the locality 

 on which they grow. They rise cone-shaped on a cone, narrow and 

 elongated on a razor ridge. Beech of two sorts (Fagus fusca and 

 Fagus solandri) are on Tutira the most prominent species growing 

 thus strictly grouped ; each possesses inviolate on its own territory 

 whole spurs. Other areas are densely covered with tawhero ( Weinmannia 

 racemosa), others again with tall tree-manuka (Leptospernum scoparium). 

 Honeysuckle (Knightia excelsa) is another species which, like the beech, 

 the tawero, and the manuka, seems to revel in dry land, its long-drawn 

 cone rising from the most arid of ridges. 



So far we have viewed the forest from above ; now we can take our 

 stand beneath the trees. In forests of this sort no imprint holds its 

 shape for long on the loose leaves ; all is in process of decay, soft and 

 yielding. The surface is cumbered with huge clumps of astelia, of species 

 of asplenium flabellifolium, flaccidum and falcatum, fallen from above. 

 Rotted branchlets and boughs, still encased in their husks or jackets 

 of darker bark, lie strewn on the ground, Many of the boles rot stand- 



