Most people think of puriri trees as gnarly and twisted remnants standing solitary in rolling farm paddocks. Or those wonderful climbing trees in the backyards of Northern New Zealand properties. They can not conceive of tall straight trees. The gnarly remnants were the only trees left by loggers because they were too hard to cut up. The straight trees were cut down for a variety of uses.
Trees like this one would have been much more common before logging started in the mid 1800's. Spot the person standing next to the tree on the left hand side. He is about 1.75 m tall, so the tree is nearly 3 m in diameter and at least 10 m to the first branch.
