BRITISH FL 0 1 VER S IN NE J V ZEAL A ND. 1 8 5 
■courses of the rivers. Water is a very important agent in the 
dissemination of seeds, and musk and watercress have, in con- 
sequence, spread very rapidly throughout our brooks and smaller 
streams. Under other less favourable circumstances, plants of 
gorse may for years flourish, yet not spread, as on sheep camps, 
where I have seen single bushes remain for years pruned into 
cones by the nibbling sheep. Broom, too, spreads very rapidly, 
and sweet briar and blackberries, when they get hold of the 
ground, are very expensive to keep down, and impossible to 
extirpate. Indeed, from the way in which the latter thrives in 
New Zealand, it seems not impossible that after a few centuries 
it will develop into a sheep-catching plant ; even now sheep 
eating the ripe berries, or walking past are entangled in the 
great hooked side shoots. In trying to escape their wool is 
twisted into a rope. They die, and the plant is stimulated to 
fresh exertions by the rotting carcase. 
Many seeds are carried by sheep, such as white clover, trefoil 
and sheep sorrel. Horehound, which grows over roods of ground, 
on rich, dry, sandy sheep camps, is probably a garden escape. I 
have seen, too, the scented geranium growing wild along the 
road sides, and not long ago I read of a bushman discovering in 
an open part of the forest an acre of flowering narcissus. 
In autumn the yellowy or ruddy leaves of self-sown elms, 
sycamores, and rowans, contrast with the sombre pine green of 
the native bush. The appearance of some species, however, is 
very hard to account for. I found a clump of Stellaria growing 
on a shady bank on a neighbour’s run six years ago. It is there 
still, but I have never seen or heard of it elsewhere in New 
Zealand. 
In the same way in a little-frequented part of my own place, 
I once discovered a single plant of St. John’s wort. I never — 
before or since — have seen this plant in the colony. Near the 
woolshed of a friend in Canterbury, who chiefly employs Scottish 
shepherds, a patch of heather has been growing and spreading 
for years. It is supposed to have dropped from the boots or 
clothes of a newly imported Highland shepherd, for seeds, 
under strange conditions and for long periods, retain their 
vitality. 
One of my shepherds, who has a taste for botany, plantcxl 
this year some of the stones taken from raisins for the Christmas 
pudding. They germinated, and were growing freely, until lately 
a sharp frost destroyed them. After an extensive fern fire, upon 
the burnt ground in spring, appear hundreds of thousands of 
plants of the mouse-ear chickweed. These fern lands have, 
of course, been fired before, but even then the appearance of this 
weed in so great quantity is strange, for the seed is furnished 
neither with apparatus for floating or clinging, nor do sheep, 
however hungry, feed upon it. 
Shepherd’s-purse, willow-herb, gowans, pimpernel, prunella, 
spotted medick, docks, nettles, plantains, and numerous other 
