NATURE NOTES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 18025, 25 February 1922, Page 1 (Supplement)

NATURE NOTES.

BY J. DRT7MMOND, F.L.S., F.Z.S.

Professor Leonard Huxley, editor of the Cornhill Magazine, has written from Frognal Lane, Hampstead, England, in reference to New Zealand being represented on a tablet placed in Kew Church, England, in memory of Sir Joseph Hooker, by a drawing of Celmisia vernicosa, which grows on the Auckland and Campbell Islands, but not on the mainland, and cannot be regarded as standing for Now Zealand's flora. It is a handsome mountain daisy, to use the popular title for New Zealand's aster-like celmisias, ■ and its varnished leaves and the purply disc of eacli flower charmed Sir Joseph Hooker when he saw it blooming pensively in summer on the southern islands. There are scores of other New Zealand plants that would have represented more adequately his interest and work in this country, unless the southern celmisia is accepted as an emblem of simplicity and modesty, two of his. traits. Professor Huxley, who is Sir Joseph Hooker's biographer, writes:—" I imagine that the celmisia was chosen to represent Sir Joseph Hooker's interest in New Zealand botany because of its uniqueness. That it occurs only in the Auckland and Campbell Islands makes it representative also of his interest in geographical distribution, and records his Antarctic voyages with Sir James Ross." Professor Huxley adds: " Sir Joseph Hooker's biography was a long task, but was in many ways a labour of love as a. memorial to one of my father's skunchest friends. With the recent death of Lady Hooker, one of my la3t links with i that great generation has been broken."*

It would be better, perhaps, if, instead of the celmisia, a characteristically Antarctic plant, which claims the admiration of all voyagers who touch at the Auckland and Campbell Islands, had been drawn on the tablet. Sir Joseph Hooker, whose judgment is indisputable, described that plant as " one of the most handsome and singular vegetable productions in the islands it inhabits, which contain a greater proportion of large and beautiful plants, relatively to the whole vegetation, than any country with which I am acquainted." Its title, Stilbocarpa, is from stilbon, "the shining one," and carpus, " fruit." Its fruit, about the size of a peppercorn, certainly is shiny, but its conspicuousness comes from its amazing evergreen leeves, from six inches to twelve inches broad, round or kidney shaped, thick, coarse, roughly haired, ribbed beneath, and bright green.

In the midst ot the copious foliage, there are small waxy flowers, yellow or green, with brown or purple eyes, which form flower clusters often almost a foot in diameter. The plant grows in orbshaped masses on rocks and banks near the sea, in marshes, and in dense and gloomy forests. It has a heavy and somewhat disagreeable smell, but it is eaten greedily by goats, rabbits and pigs, which live among the foliage. Bellingshausen, a Russian Antarctic explorer, who would be known as widely as he deserves to bo if he had not published the account of his voyages in his own language, used the leaved as cabbage for his own meals and the meals of his sailors, when lie touched at the southern islands 101 yeavs ago. It is probably the same plant that Captain T. Musgrave and the crew of the Grafton- used as food and for soup when they were' castaways oh' the Auckland Islands for about two year/j in the early "sixtieii." ■ . ,

A few flowers and leaves of a plant known as the "' native snowdrop" nave been sent by Mr. J. B. Armstrong, 15, Burlington Street, Sydenham, with the following note:—"The plant's botanical name is Arthropodium candidum. Although its beauty is of the modest sort, it is a. pretty little plant when it grows wild, as it forms broad patches of foliage with thousands of tho little pure white flowers at one time. It formerly was abundant in the gullies of the Port Hills, near Christchurch, particularly in Dry Bush Gully. The ravages of sheep and fire have swept it away, except a fow patches in Pukeatua Bush and at Governor's Bay. It belongs to the asphodel section of the lily family. The section has one other representative in New Zealand, the very much larger, but otherwise similar, ' Taranaki my,' Arthropodium cirrhatum, which also occasionally has been found on Banks Peninsula."

Speaking ,of wekas, Sir James Carroll states that in the Poverty Bay district, before fire-arms came into general use among Maoris, when a hostile expedition was contemplated and large supplies were needed for commissariat, a few men of a hapu were told off f6r the particular work of snaring wekas. They went to a place where wekas had their haunts, lay on the ground, and covered themselves with leaves, but left openings through which they could see in front of them. _ The •wekas' inquisitiveness was the basis of the art. The snarers made a noise that brought the wekas out of their hidingplaces. A movement or the display of something bright attracted them close to the fowlers, and a hand, quickly .thrust out from the leaves, made a captive. The results were surprisingly successful. A commoner method was 1 to make a small running noose on, the end of a rod some five feet long, and to tie loosely a wing taken from a dead weka on the end of another rod the same length. The rod with the wing was taken in tho left hand, the rod with the noose in the right hand. The fowlev uttered a piercing note by the use of a leaf between his teeth; In response, a weka came out of the undergrowth, tussock, or rushes. . The wing was fluttered close to the ground. The weka, following the instinct of the genus, rushed forward furiously to attack the wing, but ran its head and neck into the noose, which had been held in position, and an upward movement of the right hand rod tightened tho noose sufficiently to' make the foolish bird captive.

A beautiful little native shrub, a member of the matipo family, with drooping clusters of delicate reddish or purple flowers, and deep red buds, generally is believed to be strictly an epiphyte, that is, a plant that grows on another plant, but, unlike a parasite, does not take nourishment from it. Mr. D. Petrie, Epßom, recently found several plants of tlio species on clay soil just above low sea-washed rocky faces on Kawau Island, showing that it sometimes is tennestrial in habit. The plants Mr, Petrie saw there are of the two kinds, which may be distinguished as male and female. The male plants are less common than the female plants and have a less vigorous growth.

He did not find a single dry seed-vessel on any of the males. On the females they were plentiful, and were just ripe enough for the halves to be opening and exposing the large pitchy seeds that have given a name, pittosporum, to the genus. The seeds are embedded in a yellow gluten. When a dry seed-case opens it discloses the inner side of the two or three valves inside, which are bright orange. This is a conspicuous combination of colour with the "blackish purple seeds. Mr. H. M. Laing Christehurch, has suggested that it it may be intended to attract birds to the seeds," but it is not known whether, the seeds pass uninjured through birds' digestive canals, or how birds distribute them. The plant officially is Pittosporum cornifolium, and it is closely related' to a plant with pale green foliage and a shapely form used largely for ornamental ' hedges, Pittosporum tenuifoliurn, better known as matipo. although its proper Maori name seems 'io be tawhiwhi.