“Green Gold”
New Zealand—
The World's Richest Timber Farm.

(By O. N. Gillespie .)

(Rly. Publicity photo.)
The Railway approach to the Plantations of Commercial Pine Forests on Kaipara Harbour, North Island, New Zealand.

“I Don't see why men don't grow to be eight feet high in this country,” an American visitor said to me one day. He was looking at some ewes grazing in the shade of a shelter belt of trees which he had learned was only five years old. He was an engineering graduate of Princeton, born on a Southern farm, and knew something about both sheep and timber. He was mildly amazed at the size of the woolly animals, but was in a state of complete stupefaction at the miracle of growth wrought by trees in our country. He said they shot up like the fabled Dragon's Teeth, and asked “What were we doing about it?”

And so I came to write this article. I have described many wonderful features in New Zealand in this last few months, but in the potentialities of afforestation as an industry, and as a “life-saver” in wealth production, there are, I find, stories so exciting, tales of the future so glowing, panoramas of such golden opulence, that Hans Andersen, at his best, created nothing so brilliantly unbelievable. Yet they are all unimpeachable truth. It is on record that, at an experts’ conference, a New Zealand forestry man's plain statement of the rate of tree growth in this country was received in shocked silence—the perfect quiet of disbelief and disappointment at a good man going wrong. One Scotch authority was particularly vehement. Only after the New Zealander had gone outside, and brought to the table the cross section of a trunk with the annual rings that proved his statement, was the latter convinced. Then, handsomely, in true Gaelic manner, he apologised.

This is the stubborn, inescapable fact for friends and sceptics. A pine tree in our country grows in ten years to the size it would reach in any part of the Northern Hemisphere in twenty-five to forty years, and mostly the latter. Our illustration shows a good example.

Everyone has heard of our vast afforestation schemes. Everyone has heard cheap criticism of them of the same type that laughed at the freezing processes of meat and the use of chemical manures. The size of the ventures was so impressive, the claims made for them seemed, at first sight, to be so extravagant, that our steady-minded, highly critical and conservative folk were inclined to sniff. I like to think that all the wonders of our land, the richness of our soil, and the heady magic of our sunny skies have never altered, in one iota, the essential saneness of our national outlook. If ever a country in the world is “safe” in the best sense, it is New Zealand, inhabited as one great London writer once said when here, “by a race more British than the British.”

Being one of them, I accepted no reports, but in company with my friend of the camera, went out to see for myself.

There are, of course, many great afforestation companies in the Dominion, well founded and stable. We, however, went to one within easy striking distance and that, according to an authority, “while being truly typical has many good points of its own.” This man also said a thing which I was to remember later. “They are all past the experimental stage,” he remarked drily. “All the possible mistakes were made and put right years ago.”

In the early morning we were on our way from the Bayswater wharf, heading North. The road was perfect, the day was fine, and we were soon through that area that lies across the water from the city of Auckland. We

Locality Map, showing the situation of the Komiti and Nukuroa Plantations.

page 13

(Rly. Publicity photo.)
The winding road through the Plantations.

got a very early lesson in the prevalence of timber hunger for, in a stretch of ten miles, we saw three little peregrinating sawmills busily engaged in tearing down odd bits of plantation which dotted or bordered small farms, and which had been there for years. These now represented to the owners golden compensation for the low price of butter fat. I wondered how many of them wished they had less grass and more trees!

The asphalt road wound in and out, past dreamy little Warkworth, through the Dome Valley, and we reached the rolling down country that lies between the Kaipara Harbour and the Pacific Ocean. Then we sighted, in the distance, long undulations smothered with dull green. From where we alighted the tree masses appeared so thick as to look like enormous ribbed blankets thrown at random from ridge top to river bank. Then we passed Topuni Station, where the railway crosses one of those deep winding tidal creeks which intersect the whole of this country.

Here I stopped the party for a while to watch a half dozen pukeko dancing a measure in a marshy paddock. Their ballet dress consists of black skirt, blue blouse and collar, with scarlet beak and legs and two white dominoes behind.

We left them to enter the plantation proper, and saw first, the two year old trees. Apart from their extraordinary height, the astonishing feature was the uniformity of their growth. I asked just why each tree was the exact full brother of his neighbour. However, as we later went through millions of trees of various ages, we found this was a constant phenomenon. Then our guide, hitherto patient, amiable, but far from chatty, broke loose with the answer. The soil was the same in its constituents everywhere, the configuration of the country similar everywhere, and only an occasional swampy hollow, usually unplanted, differed from the general expanse of gentle slopes and smooth curves. On all this great property of the Commercial Pine Forests Company there are less than three hundred acres that are not ploughable.

As we progressed, mile after mile, through trees that steadily increased in height, we got the forest feeling. There was eerie silence, broken only by the occasional twitter of fantails, or the soft sough of the gentle wind. Then we stopped the car and started a hike. The ploughed firebreak, wet and soggy, made a most unlikely motor road. Here, Sir Malcolm Campbell would not have got more than a mile an hour out of the Bluebird. Thus we reached the ten year old trees. The seven year olds looked monsters, and we had, as you will see in the pictures, passed countless incredible examples of growth.

(Rly. Publicity photo.)
Pines (four years old) defeating the native bush.

But this stand of trees looked aeons old. Here were sixty and eighty foot giants with trunks four feet round, and they had been tiny seedlings when plenty of this year's Grand National runners were already racehorses. They stood in regular ranks like enormous Grenadiers, straight as masts. This, by the way, is one of the tremendous advantages of artificially grown timber over that grown in virgin forests. The trunks are free of knots and twists and their utility value therefore much greater. They towered into the sky towards which they had been racing at an average rate of six to eight feet each year.

We photographed them in a hurry, for this climate is better for trees than for men with cameras and note books. When I asked about the risk of fire, looking at the endless broad, bare ribbon of firebreak, our mentor said, looking to the sky, “There is our best fire extinguisher.” Nevertheless the patrol is systematic and never ceasing, and indeed, there has been so far no serious outbreak of fire.

Then we came to the sections which abut fairly and squarely on the waterfront. They are on the long finger end of a peninsula projecting into the inland sea known as the Kaipara Harbour, a place of great beauty and notable utility. From it radiate in every direction narrow deep tidal creeks, making a web of useful waterways which intersect and surround the plantations. Hardly is there a tree which is not within easy distance of a water channel. Through Kaipara Heads, has passed by scow and steamer New Zealand's greatest output of the mighty kauri. A five thousand ton steamer