In July 2007 a storm brought down a tree that had been growing on top of this one.
Photo: Pseudopanax (CC BY 4.0)
Kauri
Agathis australis
A kauri does not look like other big trees, because it throws away the parts that would make it look like one. We map 6 of them, in 4 cities.
It sheds its lower branches as it grows and flakes off its lower bark in plates, which keeps climbers and epiphytes off the trunk, so what you walk up to is a bare grey column with the crown a long way overhead. Tāne Mahuta in the Waipoua Forest is 45 metres tall and most of that is column. Te Matua Ngahere, in the same forest, went the other way: shorter, squatter, and thicker round than anything else standing in New Zealand. Both are protected from their visitors as much as for them, because kauri dieback travels on the mud in a shoe tread. On the Coromandel, loggers left the Square Kauri standing because its angular trunk was the wrong shape to mill.
Waipoua Forest
Everyone who walks to the largest known kauri in New Zealand scrubs their shoes first.
Photo: W. Bulach (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Coromandel Forest Park
The loggers who took almost every big kauri off the Coromandel left this one standing because it was the wrong shape.
Parry Kauri Park
The biggest kauri on New Zealand's east coast stands beside a museum car park in 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...
Photo: ShakyIsles (CC BY-SA 4.0)
San Diego
There is a New Zealand kauri on the Plaza de Panama and almost nothing about it is written down.
Explore by city: Waipoua Forest · San Diego · Leiden · Brussels · Brisbane · Seville · Munich · Tokyo · every city · or browse all species.