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Agathis australis (D. Don) Lindley |
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Family: Araucariaceae
Softwood
The Tree: Kauri is the largest and most renowned of all our timber trees. It is to New Zealand what jarrah it to Western Australia or Californian redwood is to California a tree and a timber of legendary fame and importance.The tree grows naturally north of a line from about Kawhia to Tauranga in the North Island. Mature trees remaining today average 30 m high with a columnar trunk up to 3 m in diameter. Tane Mahuta, the famous tree in Waipoua Forest, is 51.2 m high and 4.4 m in diameter5 m from the ground. It is of interest to note here that reee diameters are usually measured at breast height or 1.4 m from the ground. In the case of Tane Mahuta and other large kauris however, the base of the tree is surrounded by a mound of shed bark, litter, and fibrous roots which makes normal measurement impossible. Dense forests of kauri once covered much of the area of North Auckland and the Coromandel Peninsula, fro sea level to 600 m. Before the arrival of Europeans there was about 1.5 million hectares of forest containing kauri. By the middle of the 1920s most of this had been exploited for its timber or burnt. By 1975 the mature kauri resource that part of it which was 400-1000 years old was estimated to have shrunk to an area of 622 hectares. These remnants are mainly confined to scattered high country in western North Auckland and to remote parts of the CoromandelPeninsula and Great Barrier Island. There now exist, however, many areas of regenerating second-growth kauri. These have arisen fortuitously after the destruction of the original
forest cover. It has been estimated that the area of second-growth kauri forest, or scrubland containing regeneration kauri, exceeds 60000 hectares.
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