FERN-CRUSHING 165 



amalgamated into anything that could be termed a sward. Between 

 the isolated plants of the miserable " take " of seed there was ample 

 space left for the germination of undesirables. We shall see, in fact, 

 that as the station began to get the better of bracken, its place was taken 

 by another and a worse plant. The grassing of nine-tenths of Tutira 

 has not been it could not be a fine art run on scientific lines of 

 husbandry. It has been accomplished by brute force at the expense 

 of owners and stock. 



Between '82 and 1917 the story of this paddock will divide itself 

 naturally into seven distinct periods, each prefaced by a fire, each show- 

 ing a maximum and minimum of carrying capacity, each demonstrating 

 the ebb and flow of sheep-feed, the contraction and expansion of land 

 over which stock was able to graze. 



In the spring of '82, when I first saw the paddock, it lay a blackened 

 waste, strewn with a tangle of tough stems the ropy, parboiled stalks 

 of the latest, greenest, and therefore least combustible of the many 

 layers of fern that had covered the ground. On the damper aspects 

 the southern and eastern slopes stood extensive groves of tutu, black, 

 stiff, and stark. Mustering this block a few weeks after arrival, I 

 remember my astonishment at these miles of desolation unrelieved by 

 a single green blade. I had seen nothing like it before. Of manuka, 

 excepting a compact fire-swept patch of ten yards square on the main 

 top, there was none. The rood or so of sheep camp on the main 

 range had been ploughed and reploughed by pig in search of grubs 

 and roots. Immediately beneath the great conglomerate cliff from 

 which the paddock takes its name, also beneath lesser lines of cliff, lay 

 narrow ribbons of open land, also uprooted and grubbed and regrubbed by 

 pig. These strips of overturned sods contained survivors of such plants, 

 native and alien, as Microlsena stipoides, Danthonia semiannularis, 

 ryegrass (Lolium perenne), white clover (Trifolium repens), suckling 

 (Trifolium dubium), Cape-weed (Hypochceris radicata), Geranium sessili- 

 florum, Pelargonium australe, &c. On the very edge and rim of the 

 cliffs hung scant tufts of Poa anceps, and of Deyeuxia quadriseta, a 

 species which even to this day on Tutira seems terrified to venture 

 into the open. Here and there, too, on the rocks grew plants of 

 blue grass (Agropyrum scabrum). Except for these pig-ploughed shreds 

 and these rock surfaces the Rocky Staircase was in October of '82 a 

 blanket of blackness. Save in the immediate vicinity of these strips of 



