The forest trees are evergreens, and even in mid-winter are
fresh-looking. The glowing autumnal tints of English woods are never
theirs; yet they show every shade of green, from the light of the
puriri to the dark of the totara, from the bronze-hued willow-like
leaves of the tawa to the vivid green of the matai, or the soft
golden-green of the drooping rimu. Then, though the ground-flowers
cannot compare in number with those of England or Australia,[1]
the Islands are the chosen land of the fern, and are fortunate in
flowering creepers, shrubs, and trees. There are the koromiko bush
with white and purple blossoms, and the white convolvulus which covers
whole thickets with blooms, delicate as carved ivory, whiter than
milk. There are the starry clematis, cream-coloured or white, and the
manuka, with tiny but numberless flowers. The yellow kowhai, seen
on the hillsides, shows the russet tint of autumn at the height of
spring-time. Yet the king of the forest flowers is, perhaps, the
crimson, feathery rata. Is it a creeper, or is it a tree? Both
opinions are held; both are right. One species of the rata is an
ordinary climber; another springs sometimes from the ground, sometimes
from the fork of a tree into which the seed is blown or dropped.
Thence it throws out long rootlets, some to earth, others which wrap
round the trunk on which it is growing. Gradually this rata becomes a
tree itself, kills its supporter, and growing round the dead stick,
ends in almost hiding it from view.

[Footnote 1: The Alps, however, show much floral beauty, and the
ground-flowers of the Auckland Islands, an outlying group of New
Zealand islets, impressed the botanist Kirk as unsurpassed in the
South Temperate Zone.]

In the month of February, when the rata flowers in the Alps, there are