- 
108 The leading Physiognomic Plants and their Growth-forms. 
are narrow, but not filiform, stiff, thick, coriaceous, strongly involute, so form- 
ing a deep channel, and taper gradually to a long, filiform point; their colour 
is pale-green more or less tinged with red or orange. The leaf-sheaths are 
long, stout and persist long after the blade has rotted away, forming a close 
covering round the culm many times thicker than the living portion. 
e tussock-grasses are gregarious and thus can stamp wide areas with 
the characteristic physiognomy they bestow. They are readily set on fıre, a 
property which has led to great EDAnER in the vegetation of much of New 
Zealand as detailed in Section V, 
b. Cordyline australis (Forst f.) Hook f. (Liliac.), Ti, Tikauka, Cabbage 
tree, Palm-lly. 
This species might equally well have been classified with 'the swamp- or 
even the heath-plants, for it can tolerate most soil-conditions. It is therefore 
a familiar object of the landscape generally'). 
Its growth-form is that of a typical tuft-tree. The trunk is straight, erect, 
‚ naked and covered with rough and fissured grey bark and attains an extreme 
height of ı2 m, though usually less than half that size, with a diam. of 30to 
6o cm but even 1.5 m is recorded. The leaves are borne in a close tuft at 
the extremity of the trunk, the inner erect and semi-erect and the outer drooping. 
Young plants have leaves all up the trunk, but by degrees they die from 
below upwards, though still remaining drooping, brown and embracing the 
stem, until by the time the tree is about 3.6 m high they form a bunch mefely 
hendath the living leaves. After flowering at about the age of 8 years the 
trunk divides and thus successive branches are formed until, in old trees, there 
is a spreading head of short limbs each crowned with its tuft of green leaves. 
portion (rhizome) originates from a lateral bud. From the rhizome which 
passes perpendicularly downwards, long lateral roots pass obliquely downwards 
so holding the tree firm. Besides functioning as a tap-root the rhizome is a 
storage organ for starch, on the supply of which depends in some measure 
the blooming of the tree. a 
The leaves are ensiform, 60—g0 cm long and 3. 7-5 cm broad, thick, 
un pliable and BRAD > at the base. 
I) Were a popular vote to be taken as to which plant most affected the general physio- 
gnomy of a New Zealand landscape either C, australis or Phormium tenax would undou beedly > 
be a, and certainly the striking form of both is frequentiy met with, even yet, in the low- 
land area, while their universal cultivation in New Zealand gardens aan them still more wide- 
ly known. And yet 'they do not rule the landscape to anything like the same extent as do the 
tussock grasses in the S., the manuka, the bracken, nor, if a u of plants be compared, 
the rain-forest. AIl the same, an isolated patch of the Cordyline, or a grove in some tet. 
would at once attract the attention of. a nz from a ee land, 
