"MIST OF THE SKY"

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21580, 26 August 1933, Page 4 (Supplement)

"MIST OF THE SKY"

Mr. E. Phillips Turner, one of New Zealand's 'leading forestry authorities, has sent the-following interesting paragraph, drawing attention to one of the lesser-known of our beautiful native flowers now in bloom:

" At the present time on many of the forest trees in the beautiful bush of the Raglan road deviation are to be seen masses of a lovely white flower which, probably, most will wrongly assume to be our native clematis. It is not clematis, however, but the flower of a small native shrub called by botanists Senecio Kirkii. Usually the shrub iB epiphytic—that is, it is a perching plant—and has acquired this habit of growing in the forks of tall trees, in order that it may obtain the light necessary to its- well-being. In some lotealities, however, the plant is found in kauri forests. as an ordinary shrub of the forest floor. The shrub bears an abundance of flowers, with long, pure white rays, with a central disc of golden plaits. By the old-time Maori the shrub was called kohu-rangi (mist of the sky), probably' because often, when seen against the azure sky, it seemed to them like a cloudlet of Avhite mist." ' I wonder if any of our readers are familiar with this beautiful flower?