RAGWORT AND KOTIMANA.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 229, 27 September 1937, Page 6

RAGWORT AND KOTIMANA.

One of those newspaper pars that appear without any lawful visible means of support tells us that the accursed ragwort may yet prove to be a profitable crop, for experiments have shown that it can be turned to account as material for silk stockings. Probably this is as reliable as the information that the Germans have succeeded in manufacturing shirts from milk. Anything, however, is likely in this age. Chocolate has been made from sawdust; why not socks from ragwort? Apparently it is coming to this, that anything can be made from anything else. We certainly possess abundance of the raw material for best ragwort hose. I know some splendid sites for factories in the Wai—, but why excite inter-district jealousies?

However, it is likely enough that by the time enterprising sharemonters have set Ragwort Silk, Ltd., Inc., going merrily, the golden weed will have decided to fade away and be no more. That has been the history of more than one little unwanted in plant life. Remember the thistle, Scotch and Californian. I have seen it growing higher than a man; in fact there were places where it was almost up to a horseman'* head. There was a locallyfamous place called Scotchman's Valley, in the Waikato, not far from Cambridge. The blue-bonnets of the immigrants waved six to ten feet high. The Maori called the thistle "Kotimana"—his way of pronouncing "Scotchman"—irrespective of whether it was Caledonian or Californian.

That was in the 'eighties. But there was a plague of "Kotimana" in New Zealand at a much earlier date. An officer who wrote a narrative of the first Taranaki war. in 1860, recorded that the troops advancing along the Waitara were much impeded by a stall and thick growth of thistles, which covered the plain on the south side of the river, and they had to attack the weed with axes to clear the way for their sap digging and redoubt building. Apparently the handy slasher was not an item of army equipment in those days. But. "Kotimana" or "Merekana," the treelike thistle has passed on, its pristine vigour spent. The few patches of thistles you see nowadays in the paddock corners are mere flowerets by comparison with the old-timers. So it may be with ragwort presently. Every dog has its day, and so has every weed. —f ANOtWAT.