GREEN GARMENTS THAT MAKE THE HILLS ETERNAL.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20274, 7 April 1934, Page 12

GREEN GARMENTS THAT MAKE THE HILLS ETERNAL .

To-day’s Special Article.

The Beauty of the Insignificant Plants that Bind the Mountain .

By Johannes C. Andersen

I have stood on a hillside and seen the ravages caused by browsing animals—leaves stripped, ferns gone, the stony slope laid bare; I have seen the same hillside a few years after the browsing animals have been exterminated, and Nature had in large measures renewed the beauty that clothed the hillside before the animals were there.

The stones had their touches of spatter-lichens, of lettucelichens, of grey enamel, bronze, and gold; the mosses softened the asperities of rock; the ferns stood in the cool of the mosses like nymphs renewed.

WHAT A WEALTH of ferns we have; the delicate stonelax, an asplenium which lies along and among the stones as if too weak to raise its fronds, yet thrives in its stony company; the cradling fern or mouki with its yard-wide bower of drooping green quietly rocking its perched fernlets; the glaccietwine or maratata, whose spotted stems twine among the rocks or up the trees with equal vigour, and whose shiny leaves look as if they are wet in the sunshine and french-polished in the rain; the petako or sickle fern, whose dark, graceful fronds, sometimes four feet long, droop from the low forks of a tree; the thong-fern or makawe, whose leathery thong-like bunches hang from the trees or drape the rocks below; or in the moister heights the raurenga or kidney-fern, which looks so delicate, but on which you can tread, as at times you must, without injuring it, and whose fronds, when ornamented with their fringing spores, are racquets with which Nature gaily scatters her balls of life; the filmy ferns of these same regions, which cover all with lace-like drape and carpeting. What a wealth of beauty is conjured up by a mere mention of their names; many a glade and gully and secluded dell comes to my mind, overbowered with flowery trees and starry lianes. New Zeadand Orchids.

Once as I stood with my friend in a glade where filmy ferns seemed to keep the air moist and cool a faint fragrance caught my attention. It was autumn, and I had expected no fragrance. I searched, led by my nose, willingly, and presently we came on a big leaning fallen tree—a recumbent pillar of moss, so closely set with that living green pile with splashes of bronze and flecks of gold that the tree was quite hidden and its decay forgotten. And from the midst of this soft bed of moss sprang the stiff grass-like leaves of a clump of raupeka, the autumn-flowering orchid earina, the blossoms on their drooping stems turned up and standing erect like little creamy freesias, as fragrant and as beaulSful as that spring fairy. What a pleasure was this. And here and there we came at other times on the curious green elfs-hood or tutukiwi, a ground-orchid; or the difficult-to-see grey spotted huperei, another groundorchid, a gastrodia. This without a mention of the trees around and above, trees whose shade protected the ferns and mosses, ferns and mosses which in turn kept moist and protected the roots of the trees; luxuriant life, beauty unaffected by age; a lingering glow from the dawn of life, a glow that has yet to broaden to noonday—if we do not allow it to be quenched. Nature’s Lowly Means. But let us leave the bush; I should like you to lift your eyes unto the hills—the mountains, which keep us immune from drought; the source of our never-failing streams —also the source of our rubble of destruction if we do not preserve their covering. A casual observer standing on their slopes would suppose that with no bush there, there was little to preserve those slopes; that indeed those rocky slopes needed no protection other than their own strength affords. Nature uses lowly means for great ends. Standing on one of the great slopes of our Southern Alps, one sees everywhere, besides grassy expanses, as great expanses of shingle-slides. If you stand near the top of a ridge when a wind is blowing in summer, you will see a thin cloud of dust streaming unceasingly over the top—the lifted silt of the glacial rivers. This

settles, is eternally settling, in the crevices of the shingle-slides, and if these were left undisturbed the shingle-slopes would gradually become clothed again. One sturdy warrior, the penwiper-plant with long leathery stem reaching deep down, actually now defies the moving shingle—a hardy pioneer of the vegetable world. In places shingle-slides may be seen in process of being anchored by these and other pioneer plants, and once these have held the surface other protectors come and keep them company. Beauty of the Berries.

In the summer you hardly see them; they are insignificant plants, some shrubs, some hardy shrubs; small scrambling plants, hidden in the tussock or grasses, but noticeable on the close-cropped slopes in the autumn. That is a time of sunsets; and having seen a few of these, suddenly one day you realise that it is not only in the clouds you see the colours; these have concentrated in the million million berries which cover the mountain sides with a beadwork as beautiful if less flaunted.

You looked up to one heaven; look down, look closely, and you find another as beautiful. Berries of all shapes—globular, balloon, divided—and colours! They baffle description. You saw the flowers in summer—the blue rimuroa, the white gentian, the slender violet, the long-necked daisy—but whence these berries? They belong to the lowly protective shrubs, rewarded with beauty for their unobtrusive protection There are the moss-ruby, with translucent wine-red berries, large for the size of the plant; the wine-drop with its red berry, alsb a lowly prostrate plant; the brunnea or jewel-spray with berries of all shades of blue, one of the loveliest of the coprosmas; the bluepurple, with berries of varying shades, longer than the berries of the mossruby ; the pinatore, a trailing bush often covered with ivory-white berries; the panekeneke, with' magenta-coloured berries. Most people know the larger snowberry; the mountain-totara with its bright red fruits; the thymy-tutor with its berries divided into five like the flowers whose thickened flowers they are, cered to a berry; the heatherling, which spreads its sheets of orange berries more particularly on the riverbeds. Make the Hills Eternal. Why this wealth of beauty in these insignificant plants? They help to make the eternal hills eternal; these berries are the cradles of immortality, and each lowly plant is privileged to shape its own cradle and valance it too in colours of its own choosing. Where did they get their taste in shape and colour? —from the same fountain whence sprang the immortality. Are we going to stop the flow of this immortality ? We may for a moment; but if we persist Nature will lose patience, and in a whelm of debris—look at the waste of riverbeds we have created in places like Canterbury particularly—she will smother our land and us with it, and then patiently build up another new and beautiful land for a new and perhaps more considerate race of men who will know nothing of their destructive predecessors. . And I have not even mentioned the birds! I have not forgotten them. Our forest trees, too, have their wonderful berries, which I have called the cradles of immortality. Well, the birds rock them; and whilst they fill the present with their lullabies, they also sow the • present with beauty for the future. Will we help them in their good work?