THE GIANT TREES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 76, 30 March 1935, Page 6 (Supplement)

THE GIANT TREES.

By L. M. CRANWELL, M.A.. Botanist, Auckland Museum.

KAURI.

WHEN I was as old as von are now, it was my great desire to own a kauri tree. The trees I longed for most were by clearings, such as yon will see at Tronnson Park, and I thought that nothing could he prouder than they were in their isolation. But 1 have no tall kauri, even after the passing of years. The trees I loved and watched have gone, many of them, and it lias not been the miller who has taken them all. They have died along the fringes of the forest as wind and the-scorching breath of fire have sought them out.

I learnt through this that a single tree can rarely be saved, so closely is its well-being linked to that of its fellows in the interlocking of crowns and roots, a joint defence against the common enemy. Open up these crowns, mutilate these great surface roots, and you will bring about the " wasting of the margins that one sees in the smaller kauri reserves to-day. To save the kauri for ever, we must not be. so-niggardly. We must put aside a few big areas at every stage of growth from the slender youngster climbing up like a spire from the smother of manuka, to the old giant with slow pulse whose astounding volume is one of the wonders of plant life. These are the trees that are remembered in such prayers as tree-lovers say all over the world. Kauri, however far to the south it may' have grown in the ages that arc past, is now strictly an Auckland Province tree, but "the duty to preserve it lies with all of ns. Not

long ago there were about 4,000,000 acres of this tree, usually so crowded together that, as Earle wrote in 1827 after a journey through the forests of the Hokianga district, "We travelled through a wood so thick that the light of heaven could not penetrate the trees that composed it. They were so large and so close together that in many places we had some difficulty to squeeze ourselves through them ... all was a mass of gigantic trees, straight and lofty." Where are these trees now 1 Where, indeed, are the snows of yesteryear?

But we have Waipoua, you will say. Waipoua, my dear children, is only an experiment in forestry. Onee I, too, thought it was the last real sanctuary, of the great trees, but How I know that it would be cut to-morrow if those in power had the courage to do so. One day you will wake up to find kauri gone, and in its place there will be row upon hundred row of (neat indeed) foreign pines from California, Corsica or where-you-will, part of another experiment whose first showings are their own condemnation on these poor hills where kauri alone thrives. I ask you now —will you be willing, when your time comes, to. slaughter such beauty, ruin such a marvellous natural asset, just to provide cold cash for plastering the land with other, trees, quite regardless of how they will up to disease and the poor soils that are selected for them? " •