GORSE.

Press, Volume XLVIII, Issue 7862, 13 May 1891, Page 3

GORSE.

90 THE SDITOR OJ'TBM FBE3S. ' ■ Sib, —Anyone riding about the cooatey cannot fail to tee how the gorse is growing in the different riverbeds, especially in the Hinds and Rangitata. In places the gorse has practically grown across the whole riverbed, a email waterway only being left; bat because we have had no floods for three years, the residents have taken no notice of the growing eviL It is however within measurable distance when farmers will wake op some morninsr to find the Hinds or other

river flowing by their door, and a foot of shingle on land, which was the previous day worth say £8 an acre. That thie fact is self-evident one has only to think for a< moment how the moving shingle will bank,' up in the gorse, and then the Hinds will be at liberty to strike out a new course through Lagmhor, Windermere, Chatmoss, and Longbeach to the sea, and so doing immeasurable damage. I believe it is the law that no one individual is liable for this damage, and that the whole county will be rated for this special damage, which appears an iniquitous charge. The law compels the owner of a gorse fence to grub up any gorse growing on the roadside, m tending to stop the public traffic. I do not see why the same law should not apply to public waterways, and compel owners of land to grub gorse growing in riverbeds adjoining his freehold (more especially when the freehold is separated from the riverbed by a gorse fence), on account of its stopping a public waterway. In the past people have bought land on the river frontage to have the water, then they calmly allow the gorse to grow at will in the riverbeds, thinking that if any damage is done in the future to neighbors lower down the river that they may only have to pay £20 or £30, and people thirty miles away, who never see the river and who have no more to do with it than the dead, may have to pay £100. If such is the law, the sooner the people press for a law making the proper people liable the better it will be for their pockets.—Yours, &c, Ax Observes.