Age-old Trees.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXIV, Issue 932, 30 November 1933, Page 10

Age-old Trees.

Nature Notes.

By

James Drummond, F.L.S., F.Z.S.

KAURI at Maunganui Bluff, North Auckland, twenty-two feet in diameter, has been registered as 1280 years of age. A Mercury Bay giant, twenty-four feet in diameter, if still alive is the Methuselah of the kauri family. Its age is set down at about 1735 years. If this is correct, it sprang from the soil at Mercury Bay a few years before Septimius Sevcrus, Emperor of Rome, attended by his two sons, his whole court, and a formidable army, landed on the shores of Britain and marched past Hadrian’s Wall to subdue the turbulent Caledonians, and about 865 years before the Norman Conquest. The greatest recorded height of a kauri is 170 feet. The greatest recorded diameter is twenty-four feet. The Douglas fir, or Oregon pine, has an average height of about 200 feet. Prostrate giants of the tallest species of Australian gum-trees were 300 feet, but a height of 326 is assigned to living members of the species. This seems to be their average. A full-sized Californian big-tree, Sequoia gigantea, measured after it fell, was 300 feet high. Living Sequoias are 350 feet. Botanists believe that no Sequoia now living, or recently living, can be assigned a greater age than 1500 year*.