The cool, noiseless forests of New Zealand are deep jungles, giant thickets, like those tropic labyrinths where traveller and hunter have to cut their path through tangled bushes and interlacing creepers.  Their general hue is not light but dark green, relieved, it is true, by soft fern fronds, light-tinted shrubs, and crimson or snow-white flowers.  Still the tone is somewhat sombre, and would be more noticeably so but for the prevalent sunshine and the great variety of species of trees and ferns growing side by side.  The distinction of the forest scenery may be summed up best in the words dignity and luxuriance.  The tall trees grow close together.  For the most part their leaves are small, but their close neighbourhood hinders this from spoiling the effect.  The eye wanders over swell after swell, and into cavern after cavern of unbroken foliage.  To the botanist who enters them these silent, stately forests show such a wealth of intricate, tangled life, that the delighted examiner hardly knows which way to turn first.

[Illustration:  A western Alpine valley

Photo by Morris, Dunedin.]

As a rule the lower part of the trunks is branchless; stems rise up like tall pillars in long colonnades.  But this does not mean that they are bare.  Climbing ferns, lichens, pendant grasses, air-plants, and orchids drape the columns.  Tough lianas swing in air:  coiling roots overspread the ground.  Bushes, shrubs, reeds and ferns of every size and height combine to make a woven thicket, filling up and even choking the spaces between trunk and trunk.  Supple, snaky vines writhe amid the foliage, and bind the undergrowth together.

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.