PEDESTRIANS 305 



able to register the plant as a station alien, the sheep-farmer triumphed 

 over the weed-observer. I destroyed, though not without a pang, this 

 solitary traveller while still at some distance from the run. Next year, 

 however, burdock seedlings again had moved along the road nearer to 

 the station. Now in 1920 they are close to my boundary. Having 

 thus confessed that the plant is still an uitlander, the reader will condone 

 its inclusion in my list of Tutira plants. 



St John's wort (Hypericum linarifolium) has sauntered southwards 

 in a very leisurely fashion, colonising one after another of the clay road- 

 cuttings between Mohaka and Upper Waikari. The earliest specimen 

 actually gathered on the station was taken near the bridge over the 

 Tutira creek in 1913. Since that date the plant has again moved 

 coastwards several miles. 



Another St John's wort (Hypericum perforatum) appeared at Tutira 

 in December of 1913 on the edge of the main road. Upon my return 

 after the war the original clump had vanished, but the species had on 

 two separate spots on the roadside re-established itself. For years it 

 has grown thickly on the railway track far south of Napier. 



During the war three new roadside plants have reached Tutira one, 

 a flax (Linum sp.), I had already known of near Napier and near Petane ; 

 another, Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), first noticed close to the station 

 stables, was a complete stranger. Reaching us from the south, it seems 

 to have been carried on certain tools, for small groups of the plant have 

 appeared only where culverts have been recently deepened and cleaned ; 

 no intermediate specimens or groups have sprung up, the species has 

 confined itself strictly to soils shovelled from choked culverts. Lastly, 

 there has appeared a very worthless grass called Keflexed Poa (Poa 

 distans). I had first seen it fifteen seasons ago on the Tangoio coast 

 road. 



The reader has now seen how on Tutira each accretion in its 

 growth, each phase in its development, has been marked by the 

 establishment of one or more aliens seemingly sympathetic with the 

 particular change. Pioneer work, cessation of tribal war, stocking, seed- 

 sowing, settlement, introduction of machinery each is stamped on the 

 surface of the station in the shape of a corresponding weed ; the very 

 commerce of the Dominion indeed may be inferred from the popular 

 names. Of these station aliens, England has supplied par excellence 

 " English grass," that is ryegrass, white clover, and cock's-foot ; Scotland 



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