THE PUHIPUHI KAURI FOREST 55 
THE LESSON OF THE PUHIPUHI KAURI FOREST, 
Puhipuhi is an ideal forest country—steep, mountainous, and broken. 
It consists of a plateau 1,100 ft. high, cut into by steep valleys dropping 
down to within a few hundred feet of sea-level. Here runs the Waiotu 
River, where timber was floated down in the old days; and here now 
runs the trunk railway from Whangarei to the north, an appreciable item 
of its freight cut off with the destruction of the forest, and its acrim of 
100 cubic feet of Kauri timber per year, over 17,000 acres—viz., a pro- 
duction of 1,700,000 cubic feet of Kauri timber yearly! 
' Unless there is an immediate change of forest policy, the next three 
or four years will see the end of the Kauri forests, excepting a remnant 
which has been earmarked for slower destruction by the Railway De- 
partment. Precious though these two Railway forests are (one was bought 
back at what was considered a fancy price), there is no sign yet of their 
being worked and preserved as the rest of the cultivated world works 
and preserves Government forests of much less value. 
The fine Mamaku Forest, near Rotorua, is also being worked and 
destroyed by the Railway Department, instead of being worked and pre- 
served.* What the destruction of the remaining Kauri forests of New 
Zealand will mean, in adding to the yery heavy burden of the war taxes, 
will best be seen by taking a concrete case. 
By universal consent the Puhipuli Forest is considered representative 
of the best of the old Kauri forests, so that more note was taken of the 
circumstances attending its destruction than would have been the 
case with an ordinary Kauri forest. It will be seen, however, in the 
discussion which follows, that I have taken the Puhipuhi Forest as being 
no more and no less than an average fully-stocked Kauri area, so that 
the figures worked out below are representative of any of the ordinary 
Kauri forests of the Dominion, so far as they are now fully stocked, or 
after they have been regenerated or put into order by foresters. It 
will be seen later that there is reasonable ground for the opinion that 
the cost of this war to New Zealand would have been paid for had the 
original Kauri forests of the Dominion been worked and preserved as 
are the forests now in most civilized countries, and that this could have 
been done with considerable gain in the amount of timber available for 
cutting, and some gain in permanent land-settlement; since all the 
waste of burnt or deteriorated Kauri timber would have been saved, 
and there would have been permanent employment on the land at the rate 
of one man per 75 or 100 acres. 
J.B.T., a recent visitor to Trounson’s Kauri Park (p. 50), and one 
who knew the Puhipuhi Forest well in its nearly virgin state twenty-five 
years ago, has given me an interesting comparison between the two Kauri 
forests. He says the Puhipuhi Forest showed a greater number of trees 
with a taller average height. This accords with so many other observers. 
They compare the clean taperless stems at Puhipuhi to a string of candles 
set side by side. J.B.T, thought the soil better than that of most Kauri 
forests, but this opinion lacks confirmation. He describes the Puhipuhi 




* Since the above was in print remedial measures have been inaugurated. Pre 
sumably as soon as a Forest Department is organized these forests will be definitely 
saved, 
