SEAWEED AS HAT TRIMMING.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXVI, Issue 8190, 3 August 1912, Page 9

SEAWEED AS HAT TRIMMING.

PRECIOUS FLOTSAM. The longshoremen of the Isle of Grain aro agitating for a close season for tho zoophyte weed, whoso fine texture and delicate tracery have created a large demand for it amongst florists. The islanders are asking that the Kent and Essex Sea Fisheries Committee shall prohibit the collection of de precions material while it is growng, between March 31st and September 21st. This seaweed, much used for fashionable millinery, is of a peculiarly beautiful pattern—not unlike some of the foliage which Jack Frost traces on the window panes. It used to wash in from tho More when tho wind blew oh the land, but only in the autumn and winter months could do long, white tendrils be found on the beach and along the sea-wall, and in tho creeks which run into tho low-lying ‘’meshes.’’ Twenty-five years ago' a carpenter realised the commercial possibilities of tho weed, and its popularity grey untl it reached its zenid in 1906. In that year Queen Alexandra bought a quantity, and forthwith it could command almost any price amongst artificial florists. Two shillings a pound was not an uncommon figure. The island was invaded by agents contracting to purchase the weed, and Paris competed with London to obtain supplies. Then de Essex fishermen came and disturbed the contentment of Grain inlanders. Interviewed, the pioneer of the industry stated that their neighbours had ruined it.

“They go out to the deep water in the estuary with barbed wire fixed to their oyster dredges, and they drag the weed up by the roots in the summer, when by rights it ought to be left to grow, same as other vegetation.

“All wo can collect on the shore now is the roots they cast overboard. 1 used to pay my collectors as much as £3O or £3O a week, and whole truck-loads used to bo sent from here. Y’ou’d see as many as eighty people on the beach searching for it, and now there’s hardly a soul goes to look.' These Essex fellows drag it up in the summer; they undersell us, and they ruin the winter’s harvest.” Tho material referred to is neither seaweed nor any other vegetable substance, but is entirely animal in its nature. From spring till autumn myriads of living embryos are cast off from each colony, and are carried by currents over -wide areas until they settle down at the sea bottom, and start the formation of an immense number of new colonies. There is little fear of tho peculiar “seaweed” becoming exterminated, because from a single embryo a colony of many thousands of individual animals can be formed in 14 days.