288 TUTIRA 



example, doubtless in the first instance swept as seed from one ot 

 the Port Ahuriri stores, then grew plentifully as far as half-way to 

 Petane. It has made no further progress. Perhaps it was not to be 

 expected that a plant loving the salts of the coast should willingly 

 forgo them by an inland journey but why this stoppage before the 

 Tangoio Bluff? Why, again, has Alyssum maritimum, which used to 

 scent the whole beach road for hundreds of yards south of Napier, never 

 ventured northwards farther than the street edgings of Port Ahuriri ? 

 Sown inland as a garden flower the plant thrives, the seeds germinate in 

 profusion ; during the construction of the Napier- Wairoa-Gisborne road 

 ample space of spoil was open to settlement, depths of pulverised earth, 

 yet for some reason or another no single plant of alyssum appeared. 



Garden scabious is another species which in the 'eighties flourished 

 thickly over roods of reclaimed lands between the western foot of 

 Shakespeare Hill and Port Ahuriri, yet although in up-country gardens 

 scabious thrives, and although roadside conditions for a period might 

 have been considered eminently tempting, not a specimen has stirred 

 abroad. In the early 'nineties the shingle road between Hastings and 

 Roy's Hill was overrun during four or five seasons by Centaurea calci- 

 trapa, yet again there occurred no movement Tutirawards. Had Red 

 Valerian, firmly established on the road cuttings of Napier in '82, 

 been a plant of any enterprise, it too might now have been happily 

 domiciled at Tutira. Breaks of fissured limestone cliff obtrude at in- 

 tervals for practically the whole distance, yet it has never budged 

 from its original home. I have often thought that the passivity of 

 certain aliens provides only less food for conjecture than the spread 

 and progress of others. 



In descriptions of the physiography of the station it has been explained 

 that the lands of Hawke's Bay south of Napier are more fertile than 

 those of the great pumiceous area immediately to the north and west of 

 the Province. Before these wastes were thought of as fit for sheep- 

 breeding, draining, planting, even ploughing had progressed in the 

 south. North of Napier, on the other hand, the country was a wilder- 

 ness : the pioneer had barely set his foot on it, there was absent from it 

 that unfailing indication of man's presence, an alien self-settled flora. 

 It produced no stock ; mobs of sheep travelling northwards disappeared 

 then as in story-books travellers vanish into an ogre's den, never to 

 re-emerge ; the surplus stock of the south were driven up to die on the 



