178 TUTIRA 



utility is the spread downhill of new species. Manuka, Danthonia, 

 Microloena, Leucopogon Fraseri, Suckling, Clustered, Suffocated, and 

 Harefoot clovers, have each and all first appeared on tops and ridges. 

 There was the bracken soonest cropped and killed, there was the surface 

 of the soil first open to sunlight. 



An important factor, too, in this settlement of the run by new- 

 comers has been consolidation of the ground. There were localities on 

 Tutira where no plant life has appeared, ground so porous and spongy 

 that horses used to sink dry-bogged in it to their girths. Save for a 

 sprinkling of stunted blue grass, such spots were bare of vegeta- 

 tion. It was sponginess rather than poverty, nevertheless, which 

 had caused these bare patches. Consolidated in later times by 

 the tread of heavy horse-teams and rollers, these spots have proved 

 not less good but better than the average land. Perhaps, therefore, 

 of all changes, consolidation by trampling and treading of stock 

 has been the most vital to the needs of plant life other than 

 bracken. Perhaps there has occurred a physical alteration in the 

 nature of the soil unrecognisable save by vegetative results, marked 

 only by the appearance of grass ; certain it is that the presence of native 

 grass was in the 'eighties an unfailing mark of old pa sites and Maori 

 cultivation-grounds ; where the land had been trodden hard, Microloena 

 and Danthonia had been able to root themselves in firm ground. 

 Perhaps this process of consolidation on a huge scale accounts for their 

 triumph in later days on the Eocky Staircase, and indeed generally 

 throughout the whole trough of the station. 



To reiterate : our paddock originally was a thicket of bracken, 

 intermingled with vast groves of tutu ; consequent on the first crush- 

 ing by sheep, the latter plant was utterly destroyed ; at that date 

 manuka was unknown except for a single small patch ; later, when the 

 vigour of the bracken had been quelled, native grasses appeared sparsely, 

 then seemed to die out, whilst manuka (Leptospermum scoparium) 

 mastered the bracken and overran the paddock. Native grasses had, 

 however, been rather dominated than utterly destroyed ; at the first 

 chance they reasserted themselves, and have now taken possession of 

 the paddock. 



Notwithstanding the efforts of man, the Kocky Staircase has 

 grassed itself in its own way, selecting and rejecting, and clothing 



