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CHAPTER XXIV. 



THE NATURALISED ALIEN FLORA OF TUTIRA. 



WE think of the colonisation by England of the temperate regions of 

 the globe as for the benefit of her citizens alone, their domesticated 

 animals, their domesticated plants. The scores of tribes of smaller 

 living things are overlooked whose desire to multiply, whose lust for 

 land, is quite as keen as that of man himself. It is of them that the 

 following pages treat. 



In the wake of our sailors, explorers, soldiers, and pioneers, they 

 steal unnoticed, unobserved. The proverbial sun that never sets on 

 the flag never sets on the chickweed, groundsel, dandelion, and 

 veronicas that grow in every British garden and on every British 

 garden -path. 



Elsewhere the ancient vegetation of the run has been described. 

 Following its destruction through man's agency by fire and stock a 

 huge area of virgin soil was, to use a New Zealand political term, thrown 

 open to selection. Upon the decline of the tyranny of omniscient fern, 

 a host of ancient and eager rivals rushed upon the soil. With the 

 assistance and assent of stock the ground was seized, not only by 

 indigenous plants, whom we may imagine to have been for centuries 

 eagerly waiting for expansion and jealous of their hungry foe, but by 

 aliens brought from thousands of miles from Europe, Asia, Australia, 

 and America, from, in fact, the four quarters of the globe. 



Each of these plants had in one way or another to reckon with the 

 sheep, for Tutira, like other parts of pastoral New Zealand, lacks the 

 shady lanes of the Old Country, its roadside banks and hedges, its 

 strictly preserved game coverts into which no stock can stray. 



Wanting these natural sanctuaries, perhaps not a few weeds that 

 reach the colony may never manage to spread beyond the precincts of 



