Waipoua Forest on the west coast of Northland is what survived the kauri trade, which took nearly every large tree of the species in the country during the nineteenth century. Two of the biggest kauri alive stand four kilometres apart here, each at the end of a short walk from State Highway 12: Tāne Mahuta, the tallest, and Te Matua Ngahere, the thickest. The forest is under active protection against kauri dieback, so every walk begins at a shoe-cleaning station and stays on raised boardwalk the whole way.
0 of 2 visited in Waipoua Forest
Photo: W. Bulach (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Tāne Mahuta
Kauri (Agathis australis) · estimated 1,250 to 2,500 years old; age is not precisely measurable · Waipoua Forest, signposted directly off SH12
Everyone who walks to the largest known kauri in New Zealand scrubs their shoes first. The boardwalk is 166 metres long, takes five minutes, and never touches the ground, because kauri dieback disease travels in the soil people carry on their soles and this tree's roots run wide and shallow just under the leaf litter.
Tāne Mahuta means Lord of the Forest. Dr Robert Van Pelt measured it in 2002 at 15.44 metres round and 45.2 metres tall, with 255 cubic metres of trunk. The Department of Conservation's own page gives 13.77 metres round and 51.2 metres tall and does not say when that was taken, so read the figures as a range rather than a record. The age is an estimate by necessity, since nobody is going to core a tree like this: the usual published span is 1,250 to 2,500 years.
Either way it was mature long before the first European ship appeared off Northland, and it stood through the nineteenth-century kauri trade that took almost every other tree of its size in the country. What is left of that forest is largely what is around it.
The track closed in late 2024 for a new boardwalk, bridge and viewing platform, and reopened that December with a dawn blessing by Te Roroa, who hold guardianship over the tree. Free, open 9am to 3pm, signposted straight off State Highway 12.
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Photo: Pseudopanax (CC BY 4.0)
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Te Matua Ngahere
Kauri (Agathis australis) · commonly cited as exceeding 2,000 years; published estimates range much wider and are unverifiable · Waipoua Forest, about 4 km / 3 minutes' drive south of the Tane Mahuta car park
In July 2007 a storm brought down a tree that had been growing on top of this one. A rātā had established itself as an epiphyte in the crown of Te Matua Ngahere, and when it went it took the kauri's central leader and several branches with it. The New Zealand Herald ran the story as Storm takes heart of forest king, and foresters reckoned it had shortened the tree's life by a few hundred years. It is still standing and still draws roughly 50,000 people a year.
The name means Father of the Forest, and the shape is the point. It is not tall: 29.9 metres against Tāne Mahuta's 45. But the trunk measures 16.41 metres round, thicker than any other tree in New Zealand, a barrel that stops rather than tapers. Those figures come from a 1971 Forest Service survey and the Department of Conservation still prints them, which makes them the best anyone has, not the newest.
Its age is out of reach. DOC says over 2,000 years; other published estimates run from 1,200 to 4,000, and no one is going to core a living kauri to find out.
The walk is 730 metres from the Kauri Walks car park, about twenty minutes, ending at a platform ten metres short of the trunk. The Four Sisters walk leaves the same car park and is closed to keep dieback out. Tāne Mahuta is four kilometres up the road, a three-minute drive rather than a forest path.
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