272 TUTIRA 



long before the run was taken up, and years before a grain of grass- 

 seed had been purposely sown on the station. 1 



We now come to the best known and most widely spread of all 

 the missioners the willow (Salix babylonica). A willow leaf must 

 indeed in early times have been to the natives of New Zealand as the 

 olive leaf to the inhabitants of the Ark an emblem of hope, an indica- 

 tion that the deluge of bloodshed, strife, and rapine was abating from 

 the face of the earth. It has been carried from the tree weeping over 

 Napoleon's tomb at St Helena to the original Church of England 

 Mission Station at Paihia in the Bay of Islands, to other Mission 

 Stations of later date, and thence spread everywhere. About this 

 tree the ancestor of the willow-groves of the Dominion Sir Henry 

 Galway, at one time Governor of the island, has kindly given me 

 the following information. He writes : "I have to-day received a 

 reply from St Helena re the Napoleon willow, but there is nothing 

 in that reply to show the country from which the original willow 

 was imported. That being so, I am satisfied nobody in the island 

 can give information on that particular point. My correspondent 

 says that the willow, with other trees, was imported into the 

 island by the East India Company, and that the Tomb Valley, then 

 known as either Sane Valley or Geranium Valley, was one of the areas 

 in which the willows were planted. The willow under discussion was 

 growing before Napoleon arrived in St Helena, and the grave was 

 dug quite close to it. I send you, under separate cover, a print 

 of the Tomb, the original having been drawn after the exhumation 

 in 1840. The original willows disappeared very many years ago, and 

 those now growing are the great- great-grandchildren of the original 

 trees." 



Like the sago-palm to the Indian, the willow to the settler in 

 New Zealand is useful in a score of ways : it can be pollarded for 

 stock during drought, it can be planted for the drying -up of marsh 

 and well - head ; as no fencing is required, individual trees can be 



1 The Poverty Bay ryegrass, so famous throughout Australasia for germinating quality 

 and weight, is also directly descended from missionary sources. Mr J. N. Williams has told 

 me it was first noticed shortly after the shipment of a couple of cows from the Bay of 

 Islands to the later-established headquarters of the Mission on the Waipaoa river. There 

 the grass appeared, having either been carried in the animals' bodies, or amongst hay shipped 

 as fodder for the voyage. Mr Williams' brother, the late Bishop of Waiapu, has informed 

 me, too, how rapidly and thoroughly it killed out the native Microloena stipoides then in 

 possession of the whole of the Poverty Bay flats. 



