PANS THE GEELONG NATURALIST. 
Although our forests have not the ever-changing tints of the 
forests of Europe where we find blended the pale green of the birch, 
the somewhat deeper shade of the oak and the dark sombre green 
of the pine, still the shades of our vegetation can hardly be termed 
monotonous; for have we not beautiful gullies of sassafras that most 
symmetrical of all our trees, with its thick clustering foliage offering 
such a contrast to the somewhat ragged appearance of the great 
gums, while the pale green of the palm like fern trees, serves only 
to bring out in greater relief the darker foliage of the sassafras. It 
is hard to imagine anything more beautiful than one of the fern 
gullies round about Fernshaw. Here with a babbling brook trick- 
ling over stones and under fallen trees sometimes completely hidden 
by moss and ferns, the tree fern grows in its fuil luxuriance. In 
Ree it even attains the incredible height of between forty and fifty 
eet and a grove of such ferns with their trunks covered with creep- 
ing parasitical ferns and mosses, give to these glens a strange and 
beautiful appearance such as is seen in no other part of the world. 
Let us descend this fern gully, and observe what trees we meet with: 
by following the course of the creek. First it bubbles on through 
dense virgin forests past tall lowering gums, and through an in- 
extricable net work of ferns and wire grass. By the time it reaches. 
the lowlands it has gained volume and is now flowing more peace- 
fully through well-wooded downs as thickly if not as heavily timber- 
ed as higher up. Here it is that we first find the feathery wattles 
with their beautiful yellow bloom and delicious perfume. The 
wattle seems to have been a favourite tree of our poet Adam Lindsay 
Gordon, for we find it mentioned in many of his pieces, for instance 
in that touching piece of his, * The Sick Stock-rider," he says: 
The deep blue skies wax dusky, and the tall green trees grow dim, 
The sward beneath me seems to heave and fall ; 
And sickly smoky shadows through the sleepy sunlight swim, 
And on the very sun’s face weave their pall. - 
Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave, 
With never stone or rail to fence my bed, 
Should the sturdy station children pull the bush flowers on my grave, 
I may chance to hear them romping overhead. 
As we follow the stream still further towards the sea, it 
gradually becomes more and more sluggish and the wattles more 
frequent on its banks. Here and there we come upon thick 
clumps of wattles withered and dry. This means that the 
collectors of wattle bark for tanning purposes have been at work, 
and have so completely stripped the trees of their bark that they 
have died. Soon these silver wattles become rarer and the black- 
wood appear, mingled with a few strips of tea-treo. The creek 
now becoms split up into numbers of smaller streams, which flow 
slowly through dense dark thickets of tea-tree scrub; in some 
places, so dense is this scrub, that a man cannot pass between the 
trunks. Each slender stem shoots upwards for about twenty feet, 
and is crowned by a small tuft of needle-like foliage. Woe betide 
the unlucky wanderer who finds himself in some such thicket, for 
unless he has a compass, he may wander hopelessly for hours 
