Kaingaroa Forest covers of the Bay of Plenty Region of New Zealand, stretching from Lake Taupō in the south to Kawerau to the north. It has roughly 20 million trees. It is the largest forest plantation in New Zealand, and the second largest in the Southern Hemisphere (after the Sabie/Graskop plantation in South Africa). Prior to planting, the area was a tussock and scrub plateau (ranging between high), formed on volcanic ash. The headquarters of the forest are at the small settlement of Kaingaroa, southeast of Rotorua. New Zealand State Highway 38 crosses the forest from Waiotapu to Murupara.
History Haungaroa was a legendary Māori woman who journeyed from Hawaiki to New Zealand with several women servants to see her brother Ngātoro-i-rangi. As they travelled inland across the Kaingaroa plains towards Lake Taupō they stopped to eat. Haungaroa took so long with her meal that the other women commented on it, and the area became named Te Kaingaroa-a-Haungaroa ("the long meal of Haungaroa"). In one account, the women left Haungaroa behind, and when she tried to rejoin them, they kept speeding up so she could not catch up. Haungaroa responded by using a karakia to turn them into ti (cabbage trees). In another account, Haungaroa hit two of the maids when they teased her about her slow eating and they ran away. She chased after them and turned them into two large tī trees, which remained until pine trees were planted there. It was said that when travellers were crossing the plains, no matter how much they approached the two trees, they seemed to remain the same distance away and could never be reached.
The forest was first planted in the late 1920s and owned as a state asset by the New Zealand government. Experimental planting of douglas fir and radiata pine began on a block at Kaingaroa in 1901 and continued from 1906 using Waiotapu prison labour. By 1932 the pines averaged high and in diameter. Later planting was as an unemployment relief scheme. While under government control it was known as the Kaingaroa State Forest.
In the 1980s the government sought to sell the forests to private interests. Several Māori iwi went to Court to prevent the sale, arguing that they were the traditional owners of the land, that the land had been wrongfully taken from them, and that the government should retain the land until a settlement of Waitangi treaty claims had been reached. It took 20 years to settle the claims and to see the lands returned to the traditional owners. On 1 July 2009, it passed to a group of tribes who were the traditional land owners, in partial settlement of their claims that the Crown breached the Treaty of Waitangi. The forests themselves (the trees) continue to be owned by a private company (Kaingaroa Timberlands Ltd), which holds a forestry licence over the land.
Climate
References
External links 1:50,000 map of forest village Kaingaroa Forest on Google maps Tephra soils
Photos 1903 Kaingaroa Plain and mud covered ridges from the 1886 Tarawera eruption 1925 ploughing 1961 bulldozer 1963 aerial view 1976 aerial view of settlement