Dominion Museum ONE OF WORLD’S MOST QUEER PLANTS

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 301, 16 September 1936, Page 8

Dominion Museum ONE OF WORLD’S MOST QUEER PLANTS

The Vegetable Sheep

SOMETIMES MISTAKEN FOR THE ANIMAL

An exhibit of one of the queerest plants of the world is now’ being shown in the botanical section of the Dominion Museum, Wellington. This is the peculiar plant known as a “vegetable sheep," which is one of the species of raoulia, belonging to the compositae, or daisy family.

This plant, raoulia eximia, has the appearance of a low, woolly cushion, sometimes four or five feet long, and often taking a shape very like that of a sheep lying on the ground. It is of a whitish-grey colour and grows on high mountain sides; hence it sometimes happens that in the distance these plants are mistaken for live sheep by shepherds who are mustering in the locality. The plant cushion is made up of hundreds of small, rounded branches concealed by the woolly leaves and massed tightly together to form/a honeycomb surface; while in the centre of each small branch is sunk the flower head. The under surface is composed of a mass of wiry roots surrounding a thick and woody main root. These roots penetrate deeply into stony soil and shingle, and between the cracks of boulders which cover the mountainside, and effectively anchor the huge mass.

Collecting the Museum Specimens.

To remove the museum specimen it was necessary to use pick and mattock for a vigorous hour before /he “sheep” could be prized away from its anchorage and carried down, the mountain. When freshly-collected on Mt Torlesse, Canterbury, the plant weighed 1241 b., and was 4| feet long by 2} feet in width and height. It is the largest specimen known to have been brought down from the heights.

These plants are found on certain South Island mountains in situations above 4060 ft. altitude level where even tussock grass has given up the struggle for existence. Here the vegetable sheep braves the fierce elements, its low, rounded surface hugging the ground so that wind passes ovoj; it but cannot penetrate beneath to tear it from Its moorings. The whole plant is adapted to the allweather conditions under which it lives.

In winter it lies under thick snow for many months, but the thick, woolly covering protects the growing parts from cold or frost and excessive wet. In summer, the intensity of the sun dries and bakes the stony surface until it is too hot to bear one’s hand upon it, and yet the raoulia plant, covered with its non-conducting woolly hairs, remains unscathed, and its penetrating roots seek the supply of under-surface moisture which seeps down the mountain from the ever-melting snows higher up. Spartan Member of Plant World. For a short period in the summer this Spartan member of the plant world becomes studded with small, silvery stars tipped with golden stamens, each flower sunk among the woolly leaves on the tip of each hidden branch. The seeds of this flower are minute and furnished with a ring of silken hairs by means of which they are parachuted by the wind and carried aloft to drop later into some warm, moist rock cranny where, eventually, a new “sheep" starts into life.' Other smaller species of raoulia found in New Zealand are shown in the ipuseum exhibit. Ope is raoulia rubra, which is characteristic of the Tararua Mountains, another, raoulia buehananl, which comes no further north than the Otago mountains, while a closely-related species, haastia pulvinaris, assumes an even greater protective form against weather conditions and appears extraordinarily like a woolly lamb. Cushion plants of raoulia also are found in the mountains of Patagonia, affording another instance of the similarity of the South American flora to our own.

(Picture on Page 7.)