284 



TUTIRA 



Small-flowered Silene, 



"Poor Pretences" was then the name by which this brome-grass was 

 known on the east coast : it may be worth putting on record a suggestion 

 as to how the plant came by such a curious designation. It was a " poor 

 pretence" compared with ryegrass, cock's-foot, and white clover, the 

 mixture sown then almost as a religious duty on Hawke's Bay runs, 



good and bad alike. So much for the sense ; as 

 regards the sound, " poor pretences " can, I think, 

 only be a corruption of Poa pratensis ; the Latin 

 name of the one plant done into English has 

 been fitted to another. The reader will recollect 

 how this grass more widely known as goose- 

 grass was sown wholesale over the trough of 

 the run. Nowadays, like scores of other aliens 

 once prominent, it has practically disappeared. 



Each of these seven weeds appeared after 

 fire, though none of them overran, like Silene 

 gallica, hundreds of acres; like Cerastium 

 glomeratum, Hypochseris radicata, Trifolium 

 dubium, and at a later date Erigeron Cana- 

 densis, thousands of acres. The extraordinary spread of small-flowered 

 silene (Silene gallica), after allowing for its taste for soil of a loose light 



texture, was due to two especial factors, one 

 the viscidity of the plant's stalks and stems, the 

 other the nature of the sheep then on Tutira ; 

 they were merino, not a bare-legged breed, but 

 sheep, on the contrary, wooled to the toes. 

 Fragments of silene adhering to their shanks 

 were thus carried wherever sheep trod; in the 

 vicinity of "Flower Hill" a single stretch of 

 more than two hundred acres was in 1886 

 densely covered with silene. In another locality 

 the plant came up at a later date in equal 

 abundance. It is still a common weed along- 

 side pumice paths stirred by sheep traffic, but 

 has elsewhere almost ceased to appear. 



Another fire weed that thrived prodigiously 

 on newly -burnt land was mouse-ear chickweed (Cerastium glomeratum). 

 Scattered as great healthy plants, though never forming anywhere 

 anything approaching a matted growth, this alien in the height of its 



Mouse-ear Chickweed. 



