The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 5, Issue 5 (September 1, 1930)
The Best Timber Tree
The Best Timber Tree.
Sometimes it is claimed that America has the world's biggest trees. But if we take timber content as the test, New Zealand's kauri leads the world. The great eucalyptus trees of Australia are much loftier, so are many of the sequoia of California, which also are often somewhat thicker through than the kauri, but as has been pointed out by that great forester, the late Sir David Hutchins, neither of them carry their thickness up like the kauri. It is the shape of our famous tree that gives it its unprecedented volume of timber. The bole has little or no taper; page 30 there is no waste in buttressed base, as in so many trees, and it is often thicker at the top of the bole just below where the first branches come out than it is at the ground. Gigantic columns of wood, there is nothing like them in the forests of America. The bulk of commercial timber in the biggest recorded kauri was rather more than twice the bulk of timber in the largest “big tree” of the Calaveras groves, according to official records.