There was not sufficient grain in the country to last for more than another month or two. When it became exhausted the millers would still be in the unenviable position of having to run their mills at a loss or close down. It was quite true, added Mr Pratt, that Auckland flour-milling companies were importing Australian wheat merely to keep the mills running, and also to keep their businesses together. The position could be truly described as chaotic.
Wake up and smell the coprosma
As Mr J. Beadle, Bedford street, St Clair, Dunedin, states, most flowers and plants have a pleasant perfume. Some have a very unpleasant smell, and he asks if this is a warning indicating that the plants are poisonous.
It certainly is not. The perfume or the smell is no indication one way or the other, of a plant’s qualities. A plant, presumably, gives forth an odour for its own use or pleasure, and it is immaterial to it whether it is poisonous to people and lower animals or not. Many flowers that have a foetid smell are not poisonous. Some of the most poisonous flowers have little or no odour of any kind. The most deadly of all the deadly fungi, Amanita phalloides, neither smells nor tastes unpleasantly. Fragrant flowers attract mainly bees and butterflies and moths; foetid flowers attract mainly carrion flies and some species of beetles.
A small orchid, Karina suaveolens, is one of the sweetest smelling flowers amongst New Zealand’s native plants. The New Zealand plant with the unpleasantest of all smells is a slender, graceful shrub, Coprosma foetidissima. The smell, disgustingly foetid, and horribly disagreeable, comes from the leaves when they are bruised or are being dried.
Obstacle seen on cable car line
One of the gripmen on the Rattray street cable car service on Sunday afternoon found a large cylindrical bar of iron lying lengthways on one of the rails on the steep pinch running down into the Kaikorai Valley. Whether the obstruction found its way on to the line by accident or design it would be hard to say, but it is certain that had it not been noticed by the man in charge of a city-bound cable tram, the next Kaikorai-bound tramcar must surely have been derailed.
Green to red change signalled
One of the difficulties the Railway Department has found in greens is standardisation, and this trouble will be overcome in the distinctive shade of reddish brown which all carriages will be painted. It is ‘‘Midland Railway Lake,’’ neither wine, brick red nor blood red, but a mixture of all three, and when darkened by varnish it has a rich glow. — ODT, 29.6.1926
