Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/398

266 grow the curious kidney fern, maidenhair ferns, various kinds of sword ferns, and many other kinds of ferns; for New Zealand has about one hundred and fifty varieties of ferns. Up every gully and canyon are groves and groups of tree ferns, and at intervals the trim fronds of the nikau shoot upward.

In all New Zealand there is not, perhaps, a more pleasing forest plant than the gracefully drooping tree fern. In its slender trunk, widely spreading fronds, and leaning propensity, it strongly resembles the cocoanut palm. In forest depths, where it grows best, it commonly attains a height of from twenty to thirty feet, and one that I cut down near Waihi was fifty-two feet long. A worthy rival of the tree fern is the nikau palm. It is related to the eastern beetle nut, and is New Zealand's only palm. In the North Island it is very plentiful; southward it ranges as far as Dusky Sound. The nikau is from twenty to thirty feet high, and its fronds shoot up at a sharp angle from a trunk so smooth that birds cannot get a foothold on it. When the kaka, or wild parrot, seeks to gorge itself with the scarlet fruit growing in big clusters just beneath the branches, it has to hang head downward from the leaves. By the Maoris these leaves are woven into kits and baskets, and in woodsmen's camps they are often used as roofing.

Still more numerous than tree fern and palm are the parasites,—stranglers, creepers, and aerial marauders. Every tree sustains a climber or a mossy growth. Many of the largest succumb to the attacks of the greatest of