202 . The Biology of the High Mountain Plants. 
cushion species of Raoulia, and yet these, when cultivated in a moist green- 
house, open out their closely imbricating leaves and become very different 
objects. Every stage of gradation may be seen between the bushy-shrub form 
of Aristotelia fruticosa of a shady forest with its mesophytic leaves, and the 
strongly divaricating almost leafless plant of the forests’ outskirts, its branchlets 
spinous at their apices. In Discaria toumaton, the actual spines can be suppres- 
sed altogether by moist-air culture and the shrub become “abnormally” leafy, 
The case of Olearia coriacea, not hitherto published, is of special interest. 
This is a shrub-composite the leaves of which are small, extremely stiff and 
coriaceous, the margins strongly recurved and the leaf as a whole so bent as 
to resemble a saddle, the base being broad and rounded, the centre forming 
the hollow, while the apical  portion, so strongly recurved that the margins 
almost meet, forms the front of the saddle. Such a leaf appears at first sight‘ 
a highly. specialized xerophytic structure, but bring a plant into a lowland 
| garden, allow it to be overshadowed to some extent by adjacent foliage and 
rubs. / ' coralloides (Fig. 53), in its. “normal form” and station, 
ly se surpassed for general ‚xero] h form by any other plant 
“4 Pa j s r pt ByHe “ y x 
those of the adult, pers ER pa 
of Veronica and some of the ' normal” Teafless species of Carmichaelia or 
Corallospartium behave, so far as reversion shoots are concerned, in a similar 
manner. The above are ‚mereiy a few a out of en ‚could be 
eited and hardly do justi to the faculty for e nic ge 
Zealand 
