Blanche Baughan earned a first class degree in classics from London and then came to New Zealand in 1900. In her early years she stayed on a farm near Ormondville in southern Hawke's Bay. Her poem 'A bush section' drew on her experiences of that time. It was published in 1908 in her most significant volume of poetry, Shingle-short and other verses. Here is an extract from the poem:

Logs, at the door, by the fence; logs, broadcast over the paddock;
Sprawling in motionless thousands away down the green of the gully,
Logs, grey-black. And the opposite rampart of ridges
Bristles against the sky, all the tawny, tumultuous landscape
Is stuck, and prickled, and spiked with the standing black and grey splinters,
Strewn, all over its hollows and hills, with the long, prone, grey-black logs.

(Jane Stafford and Mark Williams, eds., The Auckland University Press anthology of New Zealand literature. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2012, p. 103)