236 Essays. 
sideros tomentosa) pendant from the cliffs or perched on some rocky headland ; 
and perhaps in some forest not far off the stately kauri pine (Dammara 
australis) uprearing its lofty head far above all its compeers; but these 
vegetable characteristics will not be found south of the East Cape. 
4. The general appearance of New Zealand vegetation (North Island) is 
not on the whole of a pleasing character. Brown fern-clad plains, and low 
hills sometimes of tolerably regular outline, but oftener of all rugged shapes 
and sizes, and dark-green almost gloomy-looking forests—here extending for 
many miles, and there in belts or patches—yield not an agreeable prospect. 
But in summer—when the sombre fern is bedecked with the neat flowering 
mantle of its neighbour, the myriad blooming manuka (Leptospermum 
scoparium) diffusing also its aromatic smell with every breeze; and the 
smaller and much more variegated woods, found nestling in deep glens and 
fringing the watercourses, exhibit their “ever-changing ever-new " forms 
and summer colours in ever-varying lights and ghades—then the New Zea- 
land vegetation appears greatly to advantage. — 
5. Not many of our larger timber trees are either handsome or graceful 
in foliage and branching when full grown, although several are both while 
young:—e.g. the drooping branched rimu (Dacrydium cupressinum), the 
graceful fern-plumaged kawaka (Thuja doniana*), the handsome celery- 
leaved tanekaha (Phyllocladus trichomanoides), the elegant poplar-like rewa- 
rewa (Knightia excelsa), the soft full-foliaged titoki (Alectryon excelsum), 
the ornate tawhai (Fagus menziesii), and in high alluvial soils the spreading 
tawhairaunui (Fagus fusca). Yet what may be absent of beauty and grace 
is more than supplied in size and utility. The huge bulk of some of the 
vegetable giants of the New Zealand forests, and the clean symmetrical 
trunks of others towering aloft in silent grandeur, can never fail to strike 
the beholder with astonishment and awe, a feeling sense of his own littleness 
and span-like existence, of admiration at “the (living) high embowered 
roof, with antique pillars massy proof,—casting a dim religious light,"— 
ending perchance in lofty thoughts tending towards immortality—is sure 
in such umbrageous retreats to steal over him. 
6. Of our shrubs and smaller timber trees, several are of strikingly 
beautiful growth, or blossom, or foliage; and are often seen to advantage 
when standing on some clear glade, or on the outskirts of a forest :—e.g. 
the houhere (Hoheria populnea)t and its varieties, the horopito (Drimys 
* Libocedrus doniana, Hook, f.—Ep. j 
t Hoheria populnea : the botanist Allan Cunningham (who first visited this North 
