“Those who camp in cool weather do not know what a tree can be.”
Thus wrote Major General A. E. Wardrop, a man described as “an old India hand”, whose principal military service was in the Deccan area of India from 1894. In his retirement years, dating from 1920, the good Major General did a safari-hunting tour with his wife of what were then known as the Central Provinces of India, and, being what was then termed “well-introduced”, he was able to gain access to some very worthwhile hunting grounds. He and his lady wife covered 3500 miles of rugged motoring through some tough country “with no involuntary stops except for two punctures and one tire burst”.
In the next few months he shot a number of tigers – absolute appalling anathema to conservationists today, but in those times, a century ago, a perfectly acceptable enterprise. He also shot other game – wild boars, sambur stags, wild dogs, four-horned deer, along with a variety of game birds that helped fill out the travelling larder. It was the way things were in those days, and no-one looked askance at the sometimes wanton slaughter.
Major General Wardrop published a book in 1923, Days and Nights with Indian Big Game, in which he recounts his hunting exploits of those times. For hunters, it is stirring stuff; for modern-day conservationists it may be less than pleasant reading. Read it only if you enjoy tales of derring-do in those early days of big-game shooting on a free scale.
These days tigers particularly are on the international endangered species list, as they should be – only a few thousand of them remain worldwide. A little over a century ago there were tens of thousands of them scattered across a broad swath of country from northern Iran right across southern USSR, into Pakistan, almost all of India, all through Indochina and a great portion of western China. As well, they were all through Malaysia, Sumatra, Java and Bali. They took a terrible toll of human life, and also wreaked havoc among the herds of goats, milch cows and work buffalo which for many of the peasants were the equivalent of today’s bank accounts and retirement funds.
But by 1972 tiger numbers had dropped dramatically, and now much of the habitat contains no tigers at all. India, without doubt, is the biggest fortress, and may perhaps contain about 5000 of the super-predators. They’re bigger than African lions, and maybe the only predator bigger than them on earth is the North American grizzly bear.
But this isn’t about tigers, or about bears. It’s about trees, and the shade they afford, both to humans and to animals. And, perhaps, the homelands they create for scores of other species – birds, insects and reptiles.
I heard an interesting snippet on National Radio recently, about the disturbing reduction in mature trees in the Australian bush, the commentator noting that big old gums, which may be 500 years old, can be home to as many as 300 and more different species of bird, insect and invertebrate, along with the occasional mammal. Without such old-man bush giants, many species would be hard-pressed to survive.
I’m sure it’s exactly the same here in New Zealand. We saw a massive Tane Mahuta totara in the Tongariro Forest near Owhango some time ago, which, in its day, may have been 40 metres high. Even now, in spite of the fact that it had the crown ripped out by storm or lightning in years gone by, its huge upper branches still hold a vast array of epiphytes, and each one of those sprawling plants will be a garden and home to scores, perhaps hundreds of insects, other tiny plants, and maybe little species not yet discovered. There’s still a lot of stuff out there in the bush we know nothing at all about.
As well, the great rough-coated totara trunk, a good two metres through, houses in the crevices and shelter of its thick layers of bark maybe a million insects and other creepy-crawly gadgets, all of them doing something useful in nature. Either they’re reducing that huge trunk to dust by eating it so it will eventually fertilise the forest’s up-and-coming generation, or they’re getting big and fat enough to sate the appetites of insect-eating birds, mice, rats, possums and other predators.
Everything out there does what it does full-on and for a reason, and they don’t often die of boredom or old age. Unlike us, they never get the chance to sit about in the sun with a chilled glass of chardonnay or foaming beer and watch the world go by.
Well, maybe some of big old bush trees get through to old age. It’s as well they do, because they each run a fairly substantial multi-century bed-and-breakfast operation to a whole host of plant and insect life that is an integral part of our bush. As well, especially in the case of an old-man totara, when it rains each of those huge trees can hold as much as 50 tonnes of water, letting it slowly drip to earth and helping to stop probable soil erosion.
And even when they die, their roots don’t rot like those of a standard pine tree. Instead, for more than 50 years they stay fixed solidly in the earth, holding the ground together and keeping hillsides staying as hillsides instead of becoming landslides.
When we moved as a family to a dairy farm in the Otewa Valley at the back of Otorohanga in 1949, the only trees on the farm were a few blue-gums and oaks along the driveway, and a liquidambar beside the old house. There was a lawsoniana hedge close in on two sides of the house that made it dark and damp, and a dense patch of manuka and blackberry at the top of the upper swamp paddock. A ring of gums, an east-west belt of pines and a ring of pines in a far paddock, and a lone cabbage tree down on the river flats were the only other plantings on the property.
The rest of the 150-acre farm was almost completely devoid of trees.
Arthur Cowan, whom my father fortuitously befriended soon after we arrived, drew Dad’s attention to the cows one hot summer afternoon. The herd was standing listless out on the Waipa Flat paddock, tails endlessly flailing in a futile attempt to flick off infuriating flies.
“They could do with a bit of shade,” Arthur quietly observed, and Dad saw that he was right.
That autumn, Dad planted 50 or more plane-tree cuttings along fencelines all over the farm, and every autumn thereafter he planted more trees – hundreds and hundreds of them. All sorts of different trees. They were neatly fenced off so the stock couldn’t chew on them, and for the first five years of their lives he watered them individually on a weekly basis through the summer, and in the autumn he cleared the summer grass and weed growth from around them so they could grow unimpeded.
In two decades he had trees which in the summer threw great patches of cooling shade across the paddocks so that stock lounged contented, restfully chewing their cud. In the spring there were trees that glowed brilliant green with new growth; others smothered themselves in red and white and purple blossoms. In the autumn yet other trees burnished the farm with scarlets and oranges and tans and deep browns and rusty reds as they vividly displayed their colours.
And many passers-by commented on the fact that “Roly’s place always looks like a park with all those trees.”
It did too.
When he semi-retired to Ohaupo in 1965, he had more time for planting, so he did. Over the next 35 years he planted trees around Ohaupo, and in Te Awamutu, and around the Pirongia Lodge grounds, and on the properties of young farmers he befriended, and on “bare bends on country roads that needed something to make them look a bit better”.
He planted natives and exotics, deciduous and ever-greens, colour and picture trees, small shrubby ones and ones that will be giants in several centuries from now. Thousands of them.
He was given a special Paul Harris Fellowship community services award by the local Rotary Club; the mayor held a small ceremony in his honour; and a little park in the middle of Ohaupo was named after him. Always it was because of trees. He loved them. And he was always encouraged and helped by Mum, who knew as much about trees as he did.
They both recognised the enormous physical and spiritual value of plants of all types, especially trees.
And if you drive out into the country at this time of year, you will see that stock – sheep, cows, deer, lama, pigs and farm dogs – all know and value the summer shade cast by trees. It’s really cool.
Kingsley Field is a columnist with the Waikato Times in Hamilton. His Outdoor columns appear fortnightly, and he has recently published his second illustrated volume of the columns and is now working on Volume III. He can be contacted at kingsley(at)accuwrite.co.nz
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