NATURE AND MAN

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 240, 11 October 1938, Page 6

NATURE AND MAN

TREES AND FLOWERS

(Edited by Leo Fanning). The other day Mr. C. P. Hainsworth, general manager of the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition Company, paused at his desk for a chat with me. Somehow I managed to bring in one of my favourite subjects, tree-plant-ing, and I pleasantly found that he was a fervent gardener. He has a fruit-farm at Ettrick, in Central Otago, where he made his home after his successful management of the big exhibition at Dunedin in 1925-6. He told me that his business life in England and other countries had not allowed him opportunities to do any gardening, for which he had a natural liking, but his chance came at Ettrick. He lacked technical knowledge at the outset, but he had plenty of zeal. As manual help was not always available, he introduced himself heartily to the spade, the fork, the hoe and other tools, and he did make the dirt fly. He made a drive about 70 yards long to his house, and planted each side with trees of various countries, including New Zealand, which is represented by Kowhai, broad-leaf, lace-bark, ribbon-wood and others. Of course, as a born Englishman, he has an oak at each side of the entrance, and he has the other trees in well-balanced company, standing like a beautiful bodyguard for platoons of beautiful flowers. Mr. Hainsworth had heartfelt joy in seeing those trees grow. From the work of his hands came a new outcrop of New Zealand—bareness turned into living ornament. Some of his friends in Ettrick had similar eagerness to beautify the landscape, so that a delightful spirit of rivalry, free from envy, grew among them.

One night he stood at his door and gazed at the star-spangled canopy. The only sounds were the sighing of a gentle breeze in the trees and the bleat of a far-away sheep. Perfect peace had settled on Ettrick. He emembered that exactly a year before, in 1929, he had been in the midst of 160,000 people on the closing night of ♦he Newcastle-on-Tyne Exhibition, -*hich he managed. A change, yes, certainly not regretted. hopes that the beautifying

spirit of Ettrick will spread to many small towns of all provinces. One expects that women will help in that movement. What a change would come over the face of nature if women, in the mass, were as keenly interested in its make-up as they are in the treatment of their own features! However, there are plenty of women av ho would rather put. colchir in a garden than on to their visages. Aboriginal Conservators. More than once I have been glad to remind the people of New Zealand that they could learn much from the old-time Maoris’ careful conservation of natural resources. On that sub-

FOR A BETTER NEW ZEALAND

ject Frank G. Speck has an impressive article in “Bird Lore” (published by the American National Association of Audubon Societies). Here are some passages:— “Do uncivilised tribes know the virtues of conservation? The question would seem to require an answer in the negative in view of what is generally believed to represent the intelligence standard of peoples who have not reached the status of advanced civilization. Surprising though it may seem, the answer is, nevertheless, in the affirmative so far as the tribes of the eastern and northern forests of the continent are concerned. Contrary to the prevailing idea as respects native ownership of the land, the Algonkian Indians, from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes, carried on their hunting in restricted, family hunting territories descending from generation to generation in the male line. It was in these family tracts that the supply of game animals was maintained by deliberate systems of rotation in hunting and gathering, and defended by the family groups as a heritage from some remote time when the country had been given to their ancestors by the Creator.

“This remark applies to the primitive hunting peoples of north-eastern Asia, Australia, parts of the Pacific, extreme South Africa, and Fuegia. It would seem that in the early stages of human cultural growth we have evidence of an understanding of the need of sustaining the balance of nature. Those tribes of mankind with limited material equipment had achieved a balance with nature which the more advanced ‘civilized’ groups have lost, with their phenomenal increase of material equipment. Aside from material considerations, we are forced to realize the existence of aesthetic appreciation of the meaning of nature at large among Indians in the hunting level. The native attitude toward wild life, both plant and animal in all forms, is one which takes stock of religious associations, even governing the lives of individuals and groups. Various families and clans among these peoples held themselves in special relationship to groups of animals, associations which have earned the name of ‘totenism.’ It would be futile here to discuss what arguments this term has provoked among sociologists, but we may admit that among these tribes no individual could feel himself free from certain obligations owed to particular animals, oftentimes to less active forms of life such as trees and plants, lhe animal world, in their view, enjoyed the right to exist in close association with human beings. Through the co-operation of human, animal, and plant life, the will of the supreme being, the Creator, was carried out This teaching permitted no wasteful or arbitrary destruction of life in any form.”