NATURE NOTES.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIIC, Issue 14152, 11 March 1910, Page 6

NATURE NOTES.

(Contributed.) A drive, along a country road at this j season may be made very interesting if one will but take notice of the plant life on the wayside. Cocksfoot is tho most common grass and its coarse itubble—where the heads have been cut off for seed —is just tall enough to stand out above the green leaves growing luxuriantly below. Here and there one sees the tall prairie grass in seed. A wayside creek is nearly choked with watercress and along its banks flax, toitoi, and niggerheads grow, secure there from the destroying hand of the i cultivator. Weeds in many parts find ] a haven of rest along the roadside, for i there they are on 'no man's land' and j are left to flourish at their own sweet will. The ox-eye daisy, in flower, is promiljent—its white flowers catching the eye from afar. Docks, too, with their broad green leaves are sending \ip their long seed stalks, brown and ripe, and each providing seed enough to stock a paddock. Spiders have been busy at work, and all among the taller grasses, and on the hedges their white "homes" of | gauze stand out conspicuously against the dark green of the vegetation. Examine one of these nests —burst it open, it is tough—and you will probably- see hundreds of tiny spiders running about in confused alarm. It makes one wonder what becomes of all I the young spiders. Do they all grow I up. Impossible, tho world would be i I full of spiders if that were so. Farther on is a drain—a deop one, for the land hereabouts at one time was a swamp—one may see the raupo, the flax, and the toi toi still growing in odd corners. Water-cress, that übiquitous plant, has taken nearly full possession of the drain.- A native creeper grows from the sides, and an odd specimen of native broom flourishes in the fertile soil of the banks. Bracken fern, that once covered the hillsides of Canterbury , realises that by the drainside it need not fear its unsparing enemy of the hillß, the fire of the runholder's men. It grows tall and strong, towering.high above the surrounding vegetaition. | CabAJrnian thistle also finds a home jon the highway, ■ and dense patches grow in shelter of the gorse. hedge. It I is easy to see where the thistles came from. A glance at the adjoining paddocks shows that acres of the thistles are growing there—one need not say vigorously, for that iB the only way Californiah thistle ever does grow.