Two kauri stand together at the entrance to this Auckland Council park in Warkworth, saved as a pair fifty years ago when the Warkworth Kauri Bushmen's Association raised money specifically to keep them and gave the land to the council once it was secured. The McKinney Kauri, over seven metres round, is billed as the largest kauri on New Zealand's east coast; the smaller Simpson Kauri stands a few steps away, its own bronze plaque giving a measured age of 600 years. A boardwalk loop runs from the Warkworth Museum car park past both.
0 / 2 in Parry Kauri Park besucht
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McKinney Kauri
Kauri (Agathis australis) · estimated about 800 years · Warkworth
The biggest kauri on New Zealand's east coast stands beside a museum car park in Warkworth. That is the claim the Warkworth museum makes for it, and the local tourism office and the trail guides repeat it: a trunk more than seven metres round, measured at 7.62, on a tree about 38 metres tall and roughly 800 years old. "Probably the largest", one of them adds, which is the honest way to hold a title nobody has formally settled.
It is still here because of a fundraiser. The park is the old property of the Reverend McKinney, later the Simpson family's, and the two giants at its entrance carry those two names. About fifty years ago the Warkworth Kauri Bushmen's Association raised money for one purpose, to save these two trees, and gave the land to the council once it was secured. Everything around them is what that fundraising bought.
Today the McKinney Kauri rises straight out of mown grass, a single clean trunk with a fence around its base and its crown still full and healthy. A boardwalk loop runs on into the bush behind it, 20 to 35 minutes if you walk the whole thing, and part of it takes a wheelchair.
Two requests come with the visit, and both are for the tree. Scrub your shoes at the cleaning station on the way in, because kauri dieback travels in soil. And stay on the boards.
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Simpson Kauri
Kauri (Agathis australis) · 600 years, per the tree's own on-site plaque · Warkworth
The plaque on the Simpson Kauri gives away its own arithmetic: 5.79 metres round, 14.94 metres to the first limb, an estimated 30.6 cubic metres of wood, and an age of 600 years, four figures fixed to a bronze plate a few steps from a much bigger tree. That bigger tree is the McKinney Kauri, and the two of them stand together at the entrance to Parry Kauri Park because that is specifically what was saved.
Fifty years ago the land belonged to the Simpson family, before that to the Reverend McKinney, and the Warkworth Kauri Bushmen's Association raised money for exactly two trees rather than the whole property. Once the ground was secured it passed to Auckland Council, and that fundraiser is the only reason either kauri, or this park, still exists.
The Simpson Kauri is the quieter half of the pair, smaller than its neighbour by two metres of girth, and its 600-year age is the figure everyone repeats because the plaque is the only place it has ever been published. What the plaque actually measured is the trunk beneath the crown, nearly 15 metres of clean wood before the first limb, which is the number worth remembering it by.
A boardwalk keeps both trees' roots free of foot traffic, and cleaning stations at the entrance ask visitors to scrub kauri dieback off their shoes before they get near either one.
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