CAMPING ON THE WILD WEST COAST.

Otago Witness, Issue 2451, 6 March 1901, Page 64

CAMPING ON THE WILD WEST COAST.

II.— THE TREES OF THE FOREST.

♦ — (By E. S. G.)

The bush has a character on the Waitakereis from that of the South Island, or even of the Wellington province. The general colour of the forest farther south is deep green, though many individual plants, like the translucent mako-mako, have the most tender tints of spring. But here, especially near the coast, where the pohutakawas are thickest, the prevailing hue is that dull, silvery grey that stirs the imagination with memories of the classic olive groves of Greece and of Italy, quivering under a sky deep-toned like " this. The Waitakerei forest j£ about half rimu. One of the most graceful of all forest forms in its youth when its slender trunk is veiled down to the very ground with its drooping cascade of delicate green, the rimu, in its old age, appears at once the most majestic and the most imperfect, the fall of dark sombre foliage from its topmost branches looking fragmentary and quite inadequate to the height of the trunk and size of the branches. Besides the rimu, we saw fine puriris with their crinkled leaves, scarlet beries and dull-coloured purplish flowers — the last, like most New Zealand blossoms, quite insignificant in general effect. But the tree we all gazed at and sat down to view, the tree even a footsore traveller -walks off his road to see, the pride and peculiar property of Auckland, is the kauri. We walked up a. lovely little stream, creeping, under a fallen trunk and scrambling up a slippery path on purpose to sit at the foot of an unusually fine group of these trees. The kauri has a magic of its own. You feel it is a monarch in the forest, lord over even the melancholy magnificence of the rimu and the richly arrayed usurping rata. Yet it is by no means the most beautiful of our forest kinds. There is something singularly impressive in the sight of the great round symmetrical column of the trunk, branchless, bare, and aspiring up to the very summit of the tree, where the umbrella-like circle of branches spreads out. You want to go on your knees and kowtow to a giant of this tribe, but it has no loveliness to feast and satisfy your eyes. Its leaves are like those of the eucalypt, dry -looking, and nondescript in colour, and it has no luxuriance of form. These charms we found in the emerald palmy branches of the tree fern, which grow here in extraordinary profusion, filling up all the interspaces of the forest. The "punga/' to give the plant its local name, grows in Auckland more freely than elsewhere, springing up again where the bush has been burnt to ashes.

Another plant peculiar to the north, and one that appeals to me at once by its exotic, grotesque, and yet beautiful shape, is the nikau palm. Young nikaus, with theii smooth bulging stems, are always quaintly graceful, but they are surpassed by the patriarchal palms, festooned with vines, till not a vestige of the trunk appears, only the crown waving above its richly-ornamen-ted column. The rata was in bloom as we passed, and we saw some trees a perfect? mass of dark red. One curious tree showed the origin of the parasite like an objectlesson. On one side the original ».imu still survived, strong and vigorous, while on the other half the rata had completely triumphed, eating away its life and flourishing in its place, so that we had the extraordinary effect of a dual tree, half rimu, half rata, inseparably locked in a death struggle.

Miles of the Waitakerei forest are Government reserve, and if there were any means of conveyance would form a magnificent national 'parls for the Aucil^dere.

At present, if you cannot afford an ex* pensive drag, you must walk. Wherever the hills part, or we reached a higher rise than usual, we saw clown long glades of forested gullies the azure waters of the Manukau. As the afternoon wore on we passed the top of the Piha. perhaps the loveliest of these valleys, and saw the fresher sapphire blue of the ocean and had glimpses oi the Lion Rock at the Piha's mouth, the tide curling in foam at its base. Visions like this, kept appearing, vanishing, and then reappearing, as our way led now up, now down, amongst slopes and heights. Just beyond where the hills break into a steep glen and we caught sight on the other side of Kari-kari, of the sea and the rocks, we came upon a dreary ploughed rise, barren, colourless, featureless, with a newlypainted farmhouse completing the unpicturesque effect. After that the forest dwindles into scrub of manuka and young kauris ; the road gradually emerges into a rugged oroken track, the mountains, slope down and end in rough rock-strewn hills, with trickling streamlets down their sides and boulders projecting in yoyr way. Ju^fc when the shadows grew long we plunged into the last manuka scrub, down the last and worst hill, and rounding a clump of pohutakawas we saw the flat ground of the Piha, a mile or so of cleared space backed by the bush the river broadening to the sea ; the groups of Scotch firs, cypress, and willows that told of bygone settlement ; the fence, the decaying cottage and the white tent ; finally our host, his sons and daughters and their young friends watching us expectantly, and then streaming up the hill to welcome us.