A BOTANIST ABROAD.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 230, 28 September 1935, Page 6 (Supplement)

A BOTANIST ABROAD.

AUSTRALIAN RAMBLES,

By L. M. CRANWELL, M.A., Botanist, Auckland Museum.

AUSTRALIA again! My short stay in Sydney took me beyond the

mangrove of the shore nnd the "brush" forest near Botany Bay. One day, after g<sing through the botany department of Sydney University, where 1 saw Professor Osborne's special pride, a thriving plant of the rare Asplenium-like cvcad called Bowenia, 1 was taken on to National Park, a huge natural reserve of over 30,000 acres, not very far from the city. It is opened by a few roads that lead down to Audley, where the calm fresh waters of the Hawkesbury River at length mingle with the salt flood from the sea. Up on the ridge one pusses out into open forest and then down a highway lined with double rows of trees, the bushy, large-leaved Tristania (grown in a few Epsom streets) alternating with poor specimens of the inevitable pinus insignia which, though native to a small strip of country in Monterey, California, does so astonishingly well in New Zealand. Here it seemed an almost complete failure. Many trees were dead and others dying or stunted. Indeed, I saw very few healthy introduced pines until I got into higher country, behind Adelaide.

Running down into National Park one sees huge patches of Doryanthes, a member of the lily family, whose red flowers and heavy fruits are a conspicuous feature of Auckland parks. Then one drops steeply into a ravine where there is a sudden change, just as though the clerk of the forests had waved a magic wand. Eucalvpts with their pendulous mistletoes, pink flowered ' tea-tree and all the harsh and narrow-leaved species give way in this moister and very sheltered part to tin}' strips of tropical forest with the species that one would expect to find far to the north. Here the trees are giants and their huge heads of large, dark green, leathery leaves are bound together with all kinds of strange and beautiful creepers, and it is dark under their canopy. Out of all this tower two species of palm—the bulky Livistona (one of the tallest palms in the world) —in abundance, and just a few of the graceful Bangalow palm, closely related to our nikau. To me the most amazing climber or liane was a Flagellaria, a monocotyledon with bainboo-like leaves •with large sensitive tips which cling to any support they may touch, thus giving each plant a thousand anchors in the treetops. These plants—and climbers in general—have such a struggle to reach the light that they adopt an "I'm the king of the castle" attitude as soon as they are on top, and they clamber so greedily over everything that they often break huge trees with their weight, and down they all topple to the ground. Before this I had seen these wonderful leaves only from the mountains of Samoa when they had been sent