Scientist Philip Simpson tells Mark Story his new book Totara: A Natural and Cultural History, is a tale of New Zealand's quintessential timber.
You write that the story of New Zealand "can be told through totara".
Totara is a tree revered by both Maori and Pakeha. It was the first
tree created by Tane because Maori culture is a waka culture and totara was needed to make the first waka. It was durable in water and in the ground, it was easy to carve, it was easily obtained from trees washed to the coast by floods because it grew along rivers. No other tree has all these qualities. The same applied to Pakeha users. Availability throughout New Zealand, durability in the ground, ease of working for splitting, all meant that totara could be used to build a home and a farm. Later on the government used totara for bridges, railways, wharves, and telegraph poles to build the infrastructure of a nation. No other tree was as useful and reliable.
The enormous 600-year old totara in A'Deane's Bush near Ongaonga gets a brief mention in your book. DOC has labelled it a "survivor". Do you have an educated guess as to why it was spared?
Today every region has its big totara, often just one. Usually they are isolated or in difficult terrain, suggesting they were left for convenience. Sometimes they were left because the trunk had had bark removed (for a bark basket) and the wood had partly rotted, so a cultural feature was kept also. People were often photographed beside big trees. They were left as a token to natural beauty.
A respect for native trees (over exotic trees) seems to be rare in this country. What do we have to gain from planting them and protecting them?
When New Zealand was settled by Europeans the bush was regarded as useless and the major task of the day was to get rid of it. A third of the country, however, had no bush (Maori fire had cleared the eastern part of the country) and firewood was needed as the main source of fuel for household use, so there was a desire to plant trees. Exotic trees released from the limitations of their home country often grew exceptionally well. But there always has been an interest in planting native trees and many people suggested totara would be appropriate. When the government set up the Forest Service they specifically rejected natives (too slow they said) and chose pines instead, so the research effort went that way. This restricted interest in natives. But as values have changed native species have become more favoured, as bird food sources, for instance.
The theme of "loss" is central to your narrative. What stands as the biggest threat to totara?
The greatest loss has already taken place: the loss of the big trees and the loss of pure stands of totara. There has also been a huge loss of hall's totara trees in mountainous areas (Ruahine for instance) from possum browse. Totara patches are often seriously infested with weeds like Tradescatia (see the trees under which Bilbo Baggins is sitting at the start of The Fellowship of the Ring), jeruselum cherry, banana passionfruit). These may not necessarily threaten trees but they inhibit the distinct community of plants adapted to alluvial forest by reducing regeneration. Pine forest establishment in regenerating totara areas will shade them out. Animals rubbing the bark off trees will kill them. However, overall, there are a lot of hill slopes regenerating totara. The best of these ought to be reserved as protected areas.