manuka

In a steamer chair, under a manuka tree that grew in the middle of the front grass patch, Linda Burnell dreamed the morning away.

The manuka-tree, bent by the southerly winds, was like a bird on one leg stretching out a wing.

There are the starry clematis, cream-coloured or white, and the manuka, with tiny but numberless flowers.

Where they once were the earth is hungry, white, and barren, though dressed in deceptive green by stunted fern and manuka.

Fraser, of Manuka, who came a little later, died of a broken heart.