Many cowboys have come and gone from the Northland swamp kauri business since Nelson Parker started extracting remnants of ancient forests from the western flanks of the Tutamoe Ranges in 1991.
Swamp kauri is valuable, with foreign websites offering it for sale for up to US$100 ($124) a superfoot, which is a section of timber one foot (30.48cm) square and one inch (2.54cm) thick.
Men with diggers are scouring Northland farms and swamps seeking kauri preserved in peat soils for 5000-30,000 years. An eager market exists for it overseas, but there are also regulations to follow: Swamp kauri can be exported without Ministry of Forestry (MAF) approval if it is a finished or manufactured product; or a personal effect. And whole or sawn salvaged swamp kauri stumps or roots can be exported with a MAF milling statement and export approval.
Long, thick slabs of swamp kauri with a side sanded can be called table tops. Like big log-like lengths classed as temple poles, they get approved for export without official queries about whether they may go back into a sawmill overseas.
But Nelson Parker plays by the rules. At Nelson's Kaihu Kauri mill and gallery, 30km north of Dargaville on State Highway 12, there is hand-blown glass, pottery, local paintings and other gifts and souvenirs. The heart of the business, however, is in big sheds back from the road, where swamp kauri stumps and logs are sawn and spend years drying before being made into artistic tables and other pieces to fill orders from around the world.
Nelson Parker, 52, is a champion axeman with shoulders an All Black prop would envy. He and his team, including Mario Marinkovich, Larry Jensen and Ken Humphreys, transform shabby stumps which look fit for a bonfire into beautiful sculpted tables worth $10,000. The tables go into containers destined for Russia, Switzerland and China, which is their best market at the moment.
Mr Parker said that since 1991, swamp kauri had become the main product processed at his mill, which previously handled only pine.
In 1994-95 he had started supplying swamp kauri to the Rose and Heather furniture company in Auckland, and sold their products in his gallery. The economic downturn over the past five years had put the brakes on this trade and Nelson's Kaiku Kauri now concentrated on producing end products.
Mr Parker said there were some big bankrolls in China and loggers could make a quick dollar digging up swamp kauri and selling it. But getting swamp kauri into a yard was the easiest part of the operation. Processing it through to the end product was the hard part.
Artistic flair was needed to bring out the ancient wood's special beauty.
And it had to be done quickly. Swamp kauri decomposed fast once out of preserving peat bogs, which Mr Parker said were "like a freezer" and the best place to leave any kauri that wasn't lined up for use.
When the Northern Advocate visited his mill, Larry Jensen and Ken Humphreys were removing bark intrusions from stump slabs which had dried for up to seven years. Mario Marinkovich was applying resin to cover paua and other sea shells and seawood placed into the cracks the bark once filled.
The surfaces of the finished freeform tables resemble rockpools and they look stunning fitted to legs created from writhing roots which have been cleaned, sanded and had their natural curves enhanced with a coating of resin.
"We're still learning, There's a lot of time-consuming labour," Mr Nelson said.
Swamp kauri could not last forever, particularly at the rate it was being dug up now, he said. But he also posed the question: "Who knows how much is there?"