VEGETATION OF THE STATION PRIOR TO SETTLEMENT 101 



ing upright or only fall portion by portion ; others prostrate are mere 

 shells crusted with epiphytes and ferns, or clad in mosses aping in hues 

 of softest green and yellow the forms of ferns, or stiff and erect like 

 thickets of fairy pine. From dead trunks and boughs of harsher fibre 

 fungus projects in ledges like lip ornaments of negro belles. Whole 

 families of toadstools, supporting flimsy fleshy stems, their dainty 

 parasols still rolled close, peep from beneath sheltered ledges. There 

 can sometimes be traced in mixed forests of this sort three fairly 

 distinct tiers of greenery : the lowest, lichen, mosses, liverwort, and 

 ferns ; the second, the massed tops of the coprosma tribe, species of 

 which, naked below, bear their leaves on top in thin planes of foliage, 

 thus creating a diaphanous mist, a twilight greenery, which in a 

 shadowy way bisects the mass of trunks. Lastly, there are the tree- 

 tops high above. In other portions of the forest there is nothing of 

 this sort noticeable, a mere jostle of smaller and more ephemeral 

 species competing with one another beneath the great pines, clustering 

 about their knees and waists fuchsia, tree-ferns, species of pittosporum, 

 of olearia, of panax, clumps of short-lived wine-berry makomako (Aris- 

 totelia racemosa) and others. 



Ferns grow everywhere, clinging like ivy to the rough stems, 

 festooning them with elegant fronds, webbing them with veils of 

 delicate rhizome, overrunning fallen boughs, drooping long languorous 

 growths from matted clumps high overhead. Rooted in massy forks 

 grow epiphytes such as Griselinia lucida, and huge rookeries of pine- 

 apple-like astelia. Mats of sweet-scented orchids Earina mucronata 

 and Earina suavolens cling with a plexus of roots to suitable sites ; 

 often a black mossy lichen exhales in sunshine a delightful violet 

 odour. Except where massed groups of a single species prevail, 

 and the ground beneath is bare and dark, there is a luxuriance 

 of growth due to the great rainfall and the large number of hours 

 of sunshine, almost unknown elsewhere. The edges of the forest 

 exhibit a still more voluptuous profusion of tangled growth, an even 

 thicker profusion than in its shaded heart clematis, rubus, vine, 

 parsonsia, and native passion-flower competing in the ampler light. 

 Such a forest as this, typical of the North Island, is in truth 

 tropical in all except degree, in all except latitude and longitude. 

 The great rainfall and the full sunshine of the Dominion have created 

 abnormal conditions. Except where massed species prevail, growing in 



