A. Introduction

Prior to this research there existed in Marlborough several hundreds of square miles which so far as can be ascertained had never been studied by a botanist, notwithstanding the fact that numerous investigators have contributed to the botanical knowledge of the Province. Indeed, the absence of roads and the difficulty of access are responsible even to-day for the fact that little or nothing is known of the vegetation clothing the north-western slopes of the Seaward Kaikouras as well as of large areas of the Inland Kaikouras and the montane area at the head of the Pelorus Sound.

Apart from the work of visiting botanists, tribute must be paid to five indefatigable students and collectors resident in Marlborough who have done much to elucidate the provincial flora by forwarding to various botanical authorities many plants previously unknown to science and many that threw light on problems of distribution or of taxonomic and ecological botany. They are J. H. Macmahon, J. Rutland, H. F. Hursthouse, J. H. Hadfield, and Miss H. M. Jenkins, M.A.

More was known of the vegetation of Marlborough by Dr. L. Cockayne, B. C. Aston, and others than has been recorded in print and several of the records of this paper were discoveries first made by these and other investigators.

Marlborough comprises portions of three botanical districts known as the Sounds-Nelson (S.N.), North-Eastern (N.E.), and the North-Western (N.W.) Botanical Districts of the South Island of New Zealand. These are in Marlborough clearly defined areas, the former two being separated by the Wairau River, and the latter occupying the triangle margined by the Wairau River and its tributary, the Waihopai River. Each of these areas is peopled by plants restricted thereto so far as Marlborough is concerned, as well as by an element in common. It is clearly insufficient and often quite misleading to record a plant as indigenous to “Marlborough,” or to “the mountains of Marlborough,” or to report it as “common throughout the South Island,” as Cheeseman so often does in his Manual of the New Zealand Flora, for in no small number of cases the plant is absent from hundreds of square miles of territory.

This paper is based on seven years' continuous study of the vegetation of the Province, and serves to place on record some of the more important and noteworthy of the writer's observations pertaining to plant distribution as well as several unpublished records by previous workers as evidenced by material in various public herbaria.