Square Kauri

The loggers who took almost every big kauri off the Coromandel left this one standing because it was the wrong shape. Its trunk is squared off, angular where a kauri should be round, and to a nineteenth-century timber trade that made it commercially useless. The rest of the peninsula's giants went to the mills. This one stayed, saved by the very feature that now makes it a landmark. It is not the biggest kauri on the Coromandel. By volume it ranks about fifteenth. Measured in 1975, the trunk was 8.76 metres round and held close to 70 cubic metres of wood, and the tree stands a little over 41 metres tall. Its age is usually given as around 1,200 years, a round figure the sources repeat rather than a count anyone has made, so read it as somewhere past a thousand. What it has that the bigger trees do not is a name, a silhouette you will not confuse with anything else, and a place right on the road. The Department of Conservation keeps a short track to it off the Tapu-Coroglen Road, which crosses the Coromandel Range between the two coasts: 187 steep steps up from the roadside, two or three minutes each way, no gate and no ticket. It is a good place to think about how many old trees are still standing because somebody once decided they were not worth the trouble.