PEDESTRIANS 295 



alien in New Zealand. On hill land impossible to plough on account 

 of gorges and land-slips, the only method of eradication is by spade and 

 mattock ; even then these diggings have to be gone over again and 

 again : the smallest rootlet grows, even half-buried leaves will root 

 strongly in damp spots. The plant, moreover, possesses an intelligence 

 and energy worthy of a better cause. Again and again I have dug out 

 bushes, especially on light lands, sending forth roots which a few inches 

 beneath the surface have followed exactly the lines of sheep-tracks 

 within range tracks enriched by manure carried from contiguous camps, 

 removal of the soil has revealed a subterranean root -system corre- 

 sponding to their sinuosities. It only remains to add that after sheep 

 had acquired a taste for the fruit, I have seen their paunches black 

 with the berries, and more especially after the arrival and increase of 

 imported birds, who carried the seed everywhere, the bramble increased 

 in a most alarming way. Although a fortune awaits the inventor, 

 no weed-destroyer has yet proved efficacious. It is impossible not to 

 look with grave concern at the future of many hundred thousand acres 

 in northern Hawke's Bay. 



Bermuda grass (Cynodon dactylon) was in the 'eighties plentiful 

 about the Port Ahuriri roadsides. It grew also in many spots along the 

 clay blinding of the beach roads. There was a great patch on the sandy 

 land opposite the old Tangoio homestead, between there and First Fence 

 another carpet, then no further signs of the plant until Tutira. There 

 this old friend still resides on its original site, where the trail strikes or 

 rather used to strike the lake, close to the modern sheep-dip. It has 

 survived changes necessitated by the widening of the pack-trail into a 

 bridle-track, and that again into a dray-road. This grass was plentiful, 

 too, about the sandy estuary of the Waikoau, from the river-mouth to the 

 Arapawanui homestead. It could therefore have come up vid the 

 Maungahinahina by the native track. As traffic, however, was a hun- 

 dredfold greater by the Tangoio route, that route has been given the 

 benefit of the doubt. 



Centaury (Erythrcea centaurium) is one of several plants first seen 

 by me on that great stock-camp the Coastal Hill. In due course it 

 reached Tangoio and afterwards Tutira, arriving at the latter place in 

 one great stride and immediately taking possession of the track between 

 the wool-shed and homestead. Thence, probably carried in sheeps' feet, it 

 rapidly skirmished along the main stock-routes of eastern Tutira. It is 



