Te Matua Ngahere

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.