184 KEW GARDENS 



to no land in fresh and tender tints, however it 

 may be surpassed in gorgeous and gigantic 

 growths. Many of our familiar plants, indeed, 

 have been introduced at the Antipodes with 

 sometimes too much success. The branches of 

 apple and pear trees will there break down under 

 their teeming crop ; the thistles rashly imported 

 into Australia by some patriotic Scot have 

 thriven to the rank of a nuisance, like the 

 rabbits ; the sturdy British gorse and sweet-brier 

 outshoot their native modesty and the design 

 of colonists who thought to make them serve as 

 hedges ; and our weeds and hedge plants take so 

 kindly to New Zealand soil as to have overlaid 

 the native flora in some districts, where the 

 coarse indigenous grass soon gives place to 

 succulent meadows spangled with daisies and 

 primroses. Water-cress, transplanted to New 

 Zealand, has grown as troublesome as the 

 American weed in our canals, to the point of 

 causing floods by damming up the streams upon 

 which it takes a new exuberant life. 



As measles or influenza fastens upon fresh 

 blood like a plague, so do many of our down- 

 trodden plants become bumptious and aggressive 

 in the stimulating air of a new world, wherever 



