VISITING THE GARDENS 188 



and scent of violets, and the other innumerable 

 acacias, here known as " wattles," that can light 

 up even the gloom of the scrub with their gay 

 blossoms. These growths are apt to run to 

 flowers rather than to fruit, the native berries 

 being sweeter to the eye than to the tooth ; and, 

 while the flowers lack perfume, it is the leaves 

 that are often fragrant, sometimes loading the 

 air with an aroma wafted leagues out to sea. 

 Then there are fine timber-trees, magnificent 

 cedars, the umbrageous blackwood, the funereal 

 casuarina or she-oak, whose dark branches droop 

 willow-like over the fitful streams ; the jarrah 

 and the karri belonging to the eucalyptus order, 

 the latter voted its most noble form. New 

 Zealand, too, has magnificent and beautiful trees 

 its kauri, king of conifers, its forests of tree-fern, 

 its jungles of flowering shrubs, its glowing rata 

 parasite, strangling the trunk that nursed it by 

 sucking the sap into its own masses of crimson 

 bloom, like a cuckoo of the vegetable world. 

 But our first Antipodean colonists would ex- 

 change a wilderness of such glories for a patch 

 of English turf; and their sons still love to 

 surround themselves with the humble garden 

 flowers and hardy blossoms of " home," yielding 



