CHILDREN OF TANE

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 285, 1 December 1934, Page 6 (Supplement)

CHILDREN OF TANE

out of a street full 'of exotics, I saw a splendid sight—a glow of red manuka by Captain E. J. Keatley's gate. Afanuka always blooms with all its might, even to the extent of impoverishing itself, but even so this wealth of red blossom was a revelation. Why don't we scatter these manukas through our gardens and make much of them? A friend who has just returned from London says that they are regarded as big attractions in the fortnightly shows there, and she herself greeted them each time as old and intimate friends.

I never know which I prefer— parchment white, pink-flushed, deep pink, or wine-red blossoms, but I do know how quickly 1 feel a sense of loss if none is to be seen. You may think this impossible away from the towns, but you must remember that ceaseless burning has made manuka the outlaw some consider it. If you burn the ground like that the trees will' not come again, and even the manuka will be stunted, as you see it over thousands of acres north of Auckland, or, again, round Rotorua, where volcanic activity has destroyed much of the bush.

In the Urewera you can travel for days without seeing any of this stout-wooded' tree, except, perhaps, where a clearing, abandoned to Tane, is a reminder of an epidemic, or of one of those old death-dealing Tuhoe raids. A few trees then, overmature yet frailly beautiful, as are those in the Auckland Domain, will remind you of the open hills "where manuka, dear flower, blows white."