An Otago man has filled farmland with thousands of saplings of kauri, creating what will likely be the largest hand-planted New Zealand kauri forest in existence.
Peter Parsons was putting the final trees in the ground this week at his 20-hectare block with a team of planters.
They first put 17,000 other native trees in the ground three years ago to then shelter the 14,000 kauri trees that had been planted over the past two months.
Though the land was full of new life, Parsons said attending funerals planted the seed in his mind.
"The person conducting the eulogy usually talks about how wonderful the person was, and then that's about it," he said.
"And I was thinking that it would be nice to leave a bit more of a legacy."
Will Mister from the planting team at Habitat Restorations Aotearoa told 1News: “It was a pretty brave plan, to be honest. Probably on paper there'd be a lot of people who'd have disagreed it was going to work.”
Now, $700,000 worth of trees had been planted with protectors on the site, with each person from the Habitat Restorations team planting around 100 to 200 a day.
New Zealand kauri were more common in Northland and Coromandel, but our warming climate was helping the species grow down south.
A GPS location and serial number had been recorded for each tree for scientific analysis.
Researchers said it will be one of our biggest hand-planted kauri forests.
Forestry emeritus professor Greg Steward said, “In terms of what's happened over the last 40 or 50 years, certainly what Peter has been doing at Taieri is right up there in terms of scale and size of planting. There'd be very few that I'm aware of that would even probably remotely approach half that scale.”
Aotearoa once had 1.2 million hectares of kauri forest. Now it was less than 1% of that.
Steward said when he was studying for his forestry degree, there had been times where he "literally could have wept over it".
On top of deforestation, the species was now also threatened by kauri dieback in the upper North Island.
In Otago, it was hoped the isolation would help protect the species.
The Taieri plantation had an unusually high survival rate so far, Parsons said.
"Normally between 40% and 60% of native plantings die, and so my 95% is down to planting slightly more mature seedlings and the use of tree guards and the sheepskin," he said.
"The hardest part is keeping the damn feral animals off the property, the goats and the deer, because they eat my trees, which is very upsetting."
To celebrate, Parsons said he would focus on finishing construction of his house beside the plantation.
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