Page:Through South Westland.djvu/125

Rh kahikatea (white pine ), or as in the rimu, clothing trunk and branches alike with what are no more than light green prickles, growing round them in spirals. Only a few pines bear anything resembling a cone. In the case of the red pine its fruit is a fleshy, acorn-like cup, brilliantly red with a blue-black seed embedded in it; in the black pine it is a small-black plum with one seed; while the white pine carries its blue-black seed outside on the tip of a bright crimson berry. They are all very pretty, and a few are eaten by the Maoris, but they tasted too much of turpentine for our palates.

At one place the track led through what looked like a colony of giant lycopodium. They drooped above the ferns in weeping sprays of bronzy-green—it was like riding under a shower of golden rain—yet these were young rimus in their babyhood. In twenty years or more, the moss-like form will grow stiff and branch erect into the forest tree, though the ends of its branches always, to some extent, retain the graceful, weeping growth. Among all the baffling secrets of the forest, this utter diversity between the young and the mature form of many of its trees, is the most baffling. It is just as though some species preserved an incognito until they were old enough and strong enough to assert themselves. There is the yellow kowai of the eastern slopes, which in spring and summer is one mass of gold—a tree sweet-pea; it may attain even to fifty feet and more. Yet