An Otago man has finished planting 14,000 kauri trees by hand on his farmland, creating what is likely to be the biggest hand-planted kauri forest in New Zealand.
Peter Parsons put the last trees in the ground this week on his 20-hectare block in Taieri, an area about the size of 20 rugby fields.
Three years ago, he and a team of planters put in 17,000 other native trees to shelter the young kauri, which were then planted over the past two months. Each planter from Habitat Restorations Aotearoa put in around 100 to 200 trees a day.
Parsons said going to funerals gave him the idea, because he wanted to do something lasting. “It would be nice to leave a bit more of a legacy,” he said.
Kauri usually grow further north, in places like Northland and Coromandel, but a warming climate is helping them grow in the south. Aotearoa once had 1.2 million hectares of kauri forest, but today less than 1% of that is left, and the trees are also threatened by a disease called kauri dieback in the upper North Island.
So far, about 95% of Parsons’ trees have survived, while normally between 40% and 60% of new native plantings die. He said bigger seedlings, tree guards and sheepskin had helped, though keeping hungry goats and deer away was the hardest part.
Every tree has had its GPS location and a serial number recorded, so scientists can study how the forest grows.
SMART Prep | Quick Question 
