Darwin

New Zealand has the most beautiful weeds you have ever seen:

 This is the only photos of weeds I have. 

My camera ran out of battery power, 

so asked Janice to take the photos for me. 

I'll post more when Janice sends them

to me so you can see what I mean.

New Zealand has extraordinary beauty and you have to see the gorgeous colours of all the vegetation growing on the grassy verges along the country roads.  Miles of different yellow flowered weeds, all perfectly blended across the yellow spectrum, only here and there spotted with white or purple flowering weeds all in exactly the right place.  Extraordinary! Spectacular!  Magnificent! Words fail me. Clearly, here Mother Nature is a humongous show-off.

Have got very interested in what Sir Joseph Banks made of this strange and otherworldly vegetation ...

 Weird, huh!

 ... but so far have only discovered Charles Darwin's assessment.

"Rather paultry" is his review of this beautiful pair of islands.  He got annoyed immediately, so he said, of the "endless miles of ferns" and he considered the New Zealanders he met as "the scum of the earth" and the Maori as "ugly, sullen and brutish savages".

Considering Beagle only visited one port in the entire nation, and that was a whaling station famous for its drinking and brothels, and that the visit took place in the months immediately leading up to the Maori wars, this is hardly surprising.  However, the real reason for this enmity was undoubtedly all those Chilean parasites that were by then gnawing their way through his innards. I'm sure it had to have been that which was making his disposition most snappy, sour and easily annoyed.

He got increasingly vile about all the countries he visited after NZ so let's be pleased at the mildness of his unpleasantness about this place, and he did end up liking it years after he left because he made good friends here who continued to correspond with him for the rest of his life, and some he even put up to become members of The Royal Society of Scientists back in London because he was so impressed with their studies in NZ botany; people like Hooker who wrote so eloquently about the strange ways NZ bees fertilise NZ orchids, or von Haus who came up with the theory of Tectonic Plates and Gondwanaland and Continental Drift and stuff like that, although the credit went to someone else.

Mind you, Darwin himself took the credit for lots of other peoples' stuff as well, particularly Wallace, who was actually out in the field so couldn't defend his copyright to his work, so these 19th century scientist folk weren't really an honest lot, were they? So why do we actually care about what they think about anything? What do they know anyway. Bah humbug!

Of course, apart from everything else, visiting a country immediately before the outbreak of war doesn't give a fair assessment of the real gestalt, does it, so let's just ignore all that Darwin had to say about the place and wait until we finally find the thoughts of Sir Joseph Banks.

Or, instead, why don't we just look at more of NZ's strange and beautiful vegetation: