Kauri Forest Garden plants added

We have added the Broadfield list of Kauri Forest Garden plants to this project and will progressively upload images of them. The garden has three sections with more than 100 kauri plants and more than 100 associated species of this forest type. We have modelled the plants grown following the book “Waipoua Kauri Forest, by W. R. McGregor 1948”, which helpfully provides a list of trees, shrubs, climbers and ferns.

At Broadfield, the kauris usually grow 500 mm a year (or with extra summer water up to 1 m, 2/3 in spring and 1/3 in autumn), and so after perhaps 16 years they produce a meaningful tree of 9-10 metres or more tall with a spread of perhaps just 2 metres.

The most distinctive visual feature of kauri forests in the wild are the vertical lines of the trunks. Within a forest canopy, kauris grow naturally perpendicular to the ground. Trees established in the open tend to have more lateral spread (because there is light on all sides), so at Broadfield we have limbed them up to produce the vertical lines found in their natural environment.

Our summer low humidity and winter temperatures preclude some plants normally associated with kauri forests in the wild, particularly tree ferns and puriri. Some of the associated trees that we grow are matai, pokaka, totara, tarata and maire.

Posted on October 23, 2015 09:05 PM by cbroadfield