21 August 2007

In the Steps of Jack Leigh

Chapter 17: Waitakere Nature Trail

(aka Arataki Nature Trail)

page 2

Here's a pigeonwood (Hedycarya arborea) (porokaiwhiri) The latin basically means a tree with sweet seeds and certainly the native pigeons would be in agreement here. I am interested that even before the berries are ripe you can see broken twigs and branchlets on the ground beneath which I assume are caused by the heavy pigeons (opossums??) overloading the small trees.

We're now on the Upper Loop Track. Just off to the right a few yards is the start of the ID Loop we have just finished.

It's a pleasant enough track.

We are offered a detour, which we take

and make our way gently downhill.

Up ahead is a strange spindly figure, whose lower trunk (?) is adorned with a poem.

I wonder idly to myself whatever happened to that volume of William McGonagall's poems that I used to own, the one with the green tartan cover.

A label identifies Coprosma rhamnoides, one of the myriad small-leaved Coprosma species.

I doubt that I will ever see,
a billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.

(0gden Nash)

Perhaps not quite fair, and we do owe a considerable amount to Prof Morton's efforts during his lifetime. I just get the feeling I am being sold something, another message about colonial sin, about victims and perpetrators, a soggy muzak that I have long tired of.

From the lookout we get a view down the valley. Nothing special, but New Zealand green is something I can enjoy any time.

There's a soft lushness about the young maire here, and the inevitable hangehange down in the bottom right hand corner.

We're now heading rather sharply downhill to rejoin the main track

I am suspicious of anything labelled order or chaos. I suspect we are imposing human constructs and limitations and values on a natural process that just is, constructs, limitations and values that are more properly reserved for strictly intentional human endeavours.

To label something naturally occurring as chaos is more about defining our own inability to comprehend a larger picture.

Time for the Lower Loop.