Aotearoa’s vast exotic forestry industry didn’t just evolve.
It specifically resulted from a 1925 government decision to plan for self-sufficiency, in the face of dwindling natural forests. And by 1984, the Forest Service
target of one million hectares of plantation forest was reached.
Although plantation radiata pine was highly visible face of the Forest Service, an integral part of its brief was the management of indigenous forest. While this mostly concerned naturally established forest, work began, in the 1960s on planting.
But it was too late for a planted indigenous forestry infrastructure to develop. The Forest Service, from the late 1970s,
fell victim to its unmitigated success as ideologically motivated forces mounted a determined bid to privatise state-owned forests. In 1987, the Forest Service was disestablished, delivering the future of forestry to the vagaries of market forces.
Critically, for the prospects of cranking up indigenous plantings with forestry methods, the Forest Service’s demise coincided for a surge of interest in restoration planting. Left to market forces, the modest demand for indigenous plants was met by small family-owned nurseries and the new
production nurseries and garden centres that were, by then, beginning to eclipse them. Such domestic plant nurseries had a long supplied indigenous plants—shrubs and trees grown primarily for aesthetic rather than restoration purposes.
The production nurseries and garden centres were early to adopt the planter bag methods that had initially gained
popularity in Latin America—part of the global
plastic bag revolution that commenced in the late 1950s.
An immediate issue with propagating potentially long-lived species in plastic bags was the root circling that all too readily occurs. Such root perversion is an anathema to forestry
nurserymen, who understand the necessity of a sound root system for the attainment of
mature, millable trees.
Two nurseries (
one North Island,
one South Island) persisted with open-ground, or forestry, nursery methods. But with planters—typically volunteers—increasingly unfamiliar with establishing bare-rooted plants, the market shrank until Taupö Native Plant Nursery, for example, was producing only harakeke, more or less regularly.
Thus, in the absence of a government strategy, the infrastructure necessary to establish indigenous species on a forestry scale failed to arise ‘organically’, and three decades of potential momentum have been lost. Consequently, extent of indigenous amenity, restoration and production planting has been a fraction of what would been achieved with the same expenditure of, mostly public, money.
The imperative for Forest Service –scale planting was patent, and nowhere more so than in the Mahurangi.
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Contents
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Part of a hope-based network restoring and enjoying the Mahurangi
Editor Cimino Cole
Deadline for submissions Midnight 31 May
Click to make a quick five-minute submission.
Not perfect but a Field day and a half
The Mahurangi Action Plan –inspired Open-Ground and
First Plan for Forestry: First director of forestry, Leon MacIntosh Ellis, brought to Aotearoa in 1920, from Canada, France and Scotland, a broad vision for forestry. Photograph New Zealand Journal of Forestry (1989) 34(2): 15–18
Worst-Silted Section: Mahurangi River above Dawson Landing is so choked with sediment that navigation by the Jane Gifford is severely tide-curtailed, in spite of such flat-bottomed scows being specifically designed to work the region’s shallow harbours. Photograph Auckland Regional Council