RIMU AND WHITE PINE

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 129, 2 June 1937, Page 9

RIMU AND WHITE PINE

INDISCRIMINATE MILLING

BUTTER-BOX MATERIAL

A protest against the .use of rimu, a valuable furniture and building timber for butter-boxes, is made 1a "Forest and Bird," which says:—

It has become apparent even to tha farmers who seldom have given a thought to forest-conservation that New Zealand cannot afford/ to send rimu arid kahikatea out of fhq country any longer. A Hawke's Bay farming association recently passed a resolution requesting the Government to prohibit the further exportation of- those timbers. We need every bit of those timbers ourselves, so fares'the North Island is concerned. 'The farmers and the dairy industry are becoming con* cerned about material for making butter-boxes. Very large quantities of these two valuable timbers' have been sent to Australia for 'that very purpose. Now, however, the Government has very wisely stopped the excessive export of white pine. ~ Rimu, it must be stated emphatically,, is too good a timber to demote to butter-boxes in lieu of the vanisning kahikatea. It should be reserved for house-building and furniture. At this moment those trees are disappearing like smoke, before the, desperate onslaught of timber-millers who have practically) a free hand in. 1 our forests. The, country is being scoured for every available standing stick. We have recently seen rimu hauled out of gorges and gullies and felled on hillsides in steep country that will fall to ruin if the destruction continues, yet the cut-away and 1 haul-away gaily continues without a thought for the future. A timber-man on the AkatarawaWaikanae mountain road, a bushman of great experience and skill, was asked by a Wellington man making an unofficial inspection of the ravaged Dush: "What is going to be done" Xvith I this high country when you strip tha big trees off it?" "Oh," he replied, "the usual thing, I suppose. Burn off the small stuff and grass the land for sheep. Anyhow, all vfe want is tha big fellows." And this" was Tugged country from a 'thousand .to .fifteen hundred feet above sea level, where the "small stuff"—the forest of the future if • cared' for scientifically— is the soil-covering that holds/the precipitous ranges and gully walls together. Young rimu ana kahikatea trees are there in their thousands, with many other species of coming-on timber. But what is this to -the timber miller, or the sheep farmer?

In the same issue Mr. E. ,;V; Sanderson, president of the Forest and; Bird Protection Society, ■ points; ■ out r that beech, totara, rimu, and kahikatea will all grow reasonably fast under proper conditions. White pine may, however, require such good,soil that'the pqst .may be prohibitive owing'to the heavy accumulation of conippund; interesj;, in-; curred by the 'initial' cost of the 'land-