A BOTANIST ABROAD

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 224, 21 September 1935, Page 6 (Supplement)

A BOTANIST ABROAD

OUR NIKAU. (Concluded.) By L. M. CHAN WELL, M.A., Botanist, Auckland Museum. Palms arc a rather isolated group of tlie monocotyledons, or plants tlint have only one seed-leaf or cotyledon, and almost invariably they have parallel veining. Our supplejack (lily family) is a good example of a monocotyledon with net reining. In addition the woody elements in the trunks (if such are developed at all) are scattered, and do not coalesce to form rings of new wood such as you will see in the dicotyledons, e.g.. in the oak and the tawa. Each of these bundles of fibres shows clearly in the rotting trunk of a nikau. In some palms, as for instance the Coco de ller, famous in India long before its home in the Seychelles Islands was known, the male and female flowers are produced on different trees; but in the nikau we have normal flowers with pistils and stamens together and each blossom set deeply on the pinkish, lavender or creamy brittle branchlets of the large inflorescence, or head of flowers. New bunches of flowers are produced over many months. They always attract insects, and at their best they may be very handsome, if rather ' stiff, If you look in a grove of nikaiv you will nearly always find the various stages from the swelling bud in its stout green sheath thinner and paler on the inside where it is tightly clenched against the smooth contour of the leaf sheath above (have you ever tobogganed down a slippery Danthonia hillside in one of these?), and this grows, splits and drops away from its firm anchorage against the cylindrical trunk. Then the many fingers of the - flower-head loosen themselves, almost as a butterfly does from its prison. In such a grove, or in any siltv stream, draining away'from it, you will find thousands of seeds in every stage of germination; thousands more lie on the ground and rot, are chewed by rats, or die away soon after germination. This is not surprising, as they will spring up in solid masses, all a tangle of stout rootlets clawing out into the soil for nourishment. While the first leaves are still undivided (and very much like those of a date palm seedling! )*the nikau can be transplanted quite easily, if it has been growing in loose soil; later it is almost hopeless to try it. When conditions are favourable groves are formed and you will all know the beauty of tall old palms, ringed with countless leaf scars (marking victories over a hundred winters!), glowing red when a shaft of light wanders on to their clustered fruits, and always casting a latticed shade on to the dry, crackling old leaves littered on the forest floor. In sunny places, too, you will see them burdened with mosses, ferns and astelias. Two or three like this near the Cascades Kauri Park, in the Waitakere Ranges, always make me think laugh-