The Big Tree.

One of our national treasures in the Waipoua Forest is a kauri tree with a circumference

“Musing on the lovely world and all its beauties one by one.”—Bliss Carman.
Picturesque Oriental Bay, Wellington, New Zealand. (Rly. Publicity photo.)

of sixty-two feet at the butt. That mighty vegetable, in other words, is more than twenty feet thick through at the ground, or about the floor space of a small house.

As to timber content, the short but huge trunk is the equivalent probably of half-a-dozen cottages. Some of its branches are the size of a good large tree. It is fortunate that this greatest relic of our wonderful kauri forests, now reduced to a remnant here and there, has never been readily accessible to the sawmiller. Indeed, it is doubtful whether any sawmill could handle such a tree, even if the bushmen succeeded in felling it. Some of the big kauris felled by the axemen and sawyers in the North were beyond the capacity of the mill saws when they were, with difficulty, brought down the creeks, and lay in the mud for years and years. The timber-man prefers a more moderate size in tress.

We must take care of that old-man kauri, and of his forty-foot companions in the grand Waipoua Forest. Fire is the one great danger, and eternal vigilance is needful. Nothing is so inflammable as a kauri forest. Luckily, Waipoua is high country, and has a heavy rainfall, and is well guarded by the foresters, otherwise the careless gumhunter and the smoker would have left the country a blackened waste long ago.