TUATEAWA TREE HUGGERS?

Well, not really. This is a bit of kiwi "can do' in operation. A ball of twine, a pair of scissors, some ingenuity and minor acrobatics was all it took! This kauri is on the slopes of Whanake. One of the few to escape the axe during during the mayhem of the colonial and post colonial period.

It's girth measured PRECISELY 4.81m. Less accurate observations and calculations suggest a total volume of timber approximating 25 cubic m. Not really the way to think about such a beautiful tree, but it was the colonial perspective.

It is really just a baby although probably well into it's second century. It is worth giving it a value in current terms because it helps to explain why these trees were cut at such a prodigious rate in the past. An exact value for sawn and dressed kauri timber could be around NZ$ 2 000/cubic m. This would make this Tuateawa specimen worth around NZ$ 50 000. The biggest Northland kauri has a volume, including it's major branches, in excess of 500 cubic m. It is a million dollar tree but it's true value is not monetary.

Today little kauri is milled other than sub fossil material, buried by the many cataclysmic events of the past few thousand years. Logging does still continue elsewhere in the Pacific Islands. Our kauri is the only temperate adapted species out of the twenty that exist. The rest grow in sub-tropical situations.

Is this specimen the largest tree in the Tuateawa area? There could well be others. One candidate is easily visible from Tuateawa. It is in what appears to be difficult country, in the hills to the north of the road on the way to Kennedy Bay. All you need to claim the record is some bush crashing ability and, of course, a ball of twine and a pair of scissors!