Stunningly beautiful wood. Photos don't do it justice as they seldom pick up the warmth and effervescence or whitebait figure it can have. Sometimes a bit soft though. They built houses, boats and furniture from it back in the day. Can be thousands of years old. Last year, I was cutting logs that were growing when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Story goes a tsunami or massively high winds flattened large forests of these ancient trees tens of thousands of years ago and they lay in peat and swamps, preserved (without actually petrifying to any great extent - it still has it's grain structure intact and is often just like cutting a green log and sometimes it has a tannin stain to it that gives it a dark and brooding mood) and now we dig 'em out and sell em' off to mainly the Chinese as fast as we can get them out of the ground (which is not all that fast if they are monsters - as in 90 cubic metres of lumber from just one log kind of monstrous, although most are not that big).
The only way many NZers can afford furniture or flooring made from Kauri these days is if they are pulling down an old house that was built with it, or are lucky enough to stumble over it in a friends paddock one day and are allowed to dig it out. It's not being felled much as it's protected most places and the really good trees are as scarce as hens teeth. My drying racks are slowly accumulating some. Not enough but as one of my most favourite timbers to work with, i probably couldn't ever get enough of it. Some are picking a long dry summer here in the North of the North Island, so that's the time to get up in a small plane and fly over the usual suspects looking for strips of dead grass - a log buried just below the surface will stop the water getting to the grass above it and/or the roots of the grass getting to sustainable depths so the grass dries off. It's quite a defined demarcation. But every canny bugger is doing the same and it's a race that's hard to win.
