The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. MONDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1928. OUR NATIVE TIMBER TREES.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 250, 22 October 1928, Page 6

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1928. OUR NATIVE TIMBER TREES.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that we can do.

The members of the Empire Forestry Commission who visited Waipoua last week have expressed their natural admiration at the magnificent kauri growing there. At the same time they appear to be surprised at the failure of the Government and the landholders of New Zealand to attempt the systematic cultivation of the kauri by forestry methods. But there qre sound reasons for this apparent neglect of the kauri, and they apply with almost equal force to the rest of our indigenous timber. As regards the kauri's rate of growth, we may be content to ignore the older estimates which gave the largest trees an age of from 1000 to 3000 years, and confine ourselves to the more recent calculations on which New Zealand forestry is based to-day. Two of the ablest and most enthusiastic advocates of the cultivation of our native bush were Mr. T. F. Cheeseman and Sir D. Hutchens. These two experts admitted that under the most favourable conditions the utmost that we could hope for from the kauri, starting now at the seedling stage, would be a timber tree perhaps 60ft in bole and 2ft in diameter after a life of one century. This means that if we started now to grow kauris we would have to wait one hundred years before we could expect to reap our harvest.

This estimate of kauri growth is strongly supported by local experience. Without taking into account the practically universal testimony of farmers, settlers and bushmen as to the slow progress of the kauri, we may refer to the experimental plantation in the Auckland Domain, where a number of kauri and other native trees were started as seedlings more than sixty years ago under conditions approximating as closely as possible to those of their native habitat. These trees have been carefully measured many times, and the rate of growth may be set down with certainty at about 12in diameter in 50 years. This measurement corresponds almost exactly with the estimates of Cheeseman atd Hutchens, and these figures at once raise the question how the country's demands for timber are to be satisfied in the interval if we have to wait 100 years for the kauri. By all means our native bush should be as far as possible preserved and cultivated. But seeing /that imported softwoods, and even eucalypts, will produce here large supplies of valuable timber in from 20 to 40 years after planting, it is upon these that we must chiefly depend for our needs rather than on our slowgrowing native trees.