This street celebrates New Zealand's tallest forest tree, Dacrycarpus dacrydioides. Once widespread in lowland forest, kahikatea grew throughout New Zealand on moist, fertile soils as the dominant tree of swampy lowland areas. It was ruthlessly cleared for farming.
The wood of kahikatea is light and easily worked, but not durable, and is especially tasty to the house borer Anobium. But the wood does not impart an odour, so was used to make boxes for packing 56-pound (25 kilograms) slabs of butter for export.
Trees were used by Māori to make waka, with a plentiful supply conveniently growing on stream and river banks. Soot obtained from burning the heartwood supplied a pigment for traditional tattooing (tā moko).
Although classified as a conifer, kahikatea is a podocarp, so the female cone is highly modified, with the cone scales swelling at maturity into an orange to red, fleshy, berry-like receptacle called an aril with a single purple-black exposed seed. Māori called this fleshy aril a koroī, which was an important food resource, served at feasts.
Kahikatea has male and female trees. The male tree glows a faint orange when the cones are mature, a female red when the koroī are ripe.
A tree growing near Matirangi Forest in east Taranaki measures 56.4 metres in height. Typically growing to 50 metres or more, kahikatea is often fluted and buttressed at the base, with the trunk clear of branches for a substantial height.
The bark on a young tree is banded, becoming flaky on a mature tree. The bark characters and tree form are thus the principal aid in field identification. The foliage it regularly sheds (along with branchlets) can confirm identification. It is this last characteristic that caused an immature kahikatea to fall foul of some members of a tennis club, who organised for the tree's early demise.
In contrast, others welcome the presence of their small stand. A kindergarten in Tukapa Street boasts: "Our kindergarten has a beautiful shady playground overlooked by kahikatea trees.”
This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.
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