With one or two exceptions the trees are evergreen, and consist of many species belonging to diverse families. Occasionally the bases of the trunks develop plank-like buttresses (fig. 7), and their uppermost roots frequently stretch over the forest-floor, half-buried, or at times raised high above the ground. Such roots and bases of the trees are closely covered with mosses and liverworts. In their interstices humus lodges, in which many ferns and seedling plants find a fitting home.

Tree-ferns, sometimes 20 ft. or 30 ft. in height, with enormous feathery leaves like giant umbrellas, frequently occur, often in groups and groves. Close-growing, small-leaved, shrubs of dense habit form thickets. On tree-fern stems, on fallen trees, and even on the forest-floor are sheets of delicate filmy ferns. Lichens of great size, white or golden or dusky, abound (fig. 8). Perched high up in the forest-roof, in the forks of the branches are bird-nest-like masses, several feet in circumference, of a plant of the lily family (kahakaha, Astelia Solandri) (fig. 9). Long fronds of ferns and lycopods several feet in length hang drooping from the boughs, and certain orchids, with aerial roots, and page 28 page 29shrubs of various kinds, too, grow high on other trees, whose boughs thus support veritable gardens. In some few cases the flowers of. a tree are produced on the thick branches, as in the kohekohe (Dysoxylum spectabile), and not, as usual, from amongst the leaves. Now, should a botanist knowing nothing of New Zealand read this description, he would at once conclude it was no account of the forest of a temperate climate, but of one in the tropics. And this is quite true: the common 'forest of New Zealand, owing partly to its origin but far more to the moist and equable climate, must be classed with the tropical, not with the temperate forests.