Creatures and Features: Kahikatea

Kahikatea (white pine) or, if you are a fancy pants spell casting wizard, ‘Dacrycarpus dacrydioides’. It is New Zealand's tallest tree, gaining heights of 60 m over a life span of 600 years.

In Māori culture, it is an important source of timber for the building of waka and making of tools, of food in the form of its berries, and of dye.

Much of New Zealand looks like a large patchwork quilt of rural farmland. Occasionally dotted throughout the low-land agricultural landscape are areas of native podocarp-hardwood forest. These show us what much of the region would have once looked like.

Unfortunately, their rich soils have largely led to the demise of these forests when the land is used for farming.

Podocarp forests can still be found in some parts of the central North Island, Taranaki,Coromandel, Northland and in Southland. The largest podocarp forests are on the west coast of the South Island.