Your two-minute tree break - The Phyllocladus family 🍀

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Give your focus a break and check out three on a family tree – the Phyllocladus family. The Phyllocladaceae family incorporates a miniature genus of conifers, including the following three very attractive smaller forest trees.

Tanekaha
(Phyllocladus trichmanoides)

This conical medium height forest native grows steadily to four metres by ten years, and up to a maximum of 20 metres. It’s hardy and tolerates most soils though it prefers moist ground with good drainage and dappled shading. As the tree matures, the crown spreads and rounds out while the bark turns red-brown, thickens, and becomes rough, and in old trees, sometimes develops vertical cracks.

Generally monoecious (male and female on the same tree), Tanekaha is often dioecious.

$140 each $650 each

Toatoa
(Phyllocladus toatoa – aka Phyllocladus glaucus)

Toatoa grows just two metres at ten years, to a maximum of fifteen metres, and is a long-lived tree. In the wild it inhabits lowland and montane forests from Ahipara, south to Ruapehu, as well as Great Barrier Island.

Like other family members Toatoa has phylloclades instead of leaves - flattened photosynthetic extensions of branches or twigs. In juveniles they are blue-green, while mature trees have thick, cuneate, bronzed foliage with distinctly whorled branches.

Toatoa is often dioecious. It is tolerant of relatively infertile soils, and thrives on exposed ridges, poor-draining soils and at swamp edges, but prefers free draining, moist, cool soil with cool shaded roots, while the frost-hardy tree itself is exposed to full sun.

$750 each $2200 each

Mountain Toatoa (Phyllocladus alpinus)

Phyllocladus alpinus is a close monoecious sister to Toatoa (Phyllocladus toatoa). It grows to two metres in ten years up to ten metres and is found in the North and South Islands; mainly in sub-alpine and montane forests up to 1600m, and though not coastal, also in the south at sea level. P. Alpinus prefers shelter.

$150 each $1750 each

Tanekaha (Phyllocladus trichmanoides) is a sadly undervalued native tree.

As a soft wood it yields strong, pliable timber which will stand in direct contact with the ground for up to 15 years.
Maori named Tanekaha, Strong Man, owing to its high quality strong, ‘elastic’ timber.
Tanekaha’s erect pyramidal form with its conical crown and slender spreading branches, makes a beautiful specimen tree
P.trichmanoides drops its lower branches as it gains height leaving clean straight trunks
Sought out from earliest times by Maori and Europeans for the strong timber, and tannin-rich bark from which Maori made dyes.
Used extensively by Maori for a range of ailments from dysentery, to liver disorders, and is still in popular use by modern herbalists for variety of complaints from asthma to dysentery and glandular swelling.

Toatoa (Phyllocladus toatoa/glaucus) was described by botanist and director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, Sir Joseph Hooker, as ‘the most charming of all the new Zealand pines’.

Toatoa timber is white with an extraordinarily straight grain
The timber is exceptionally strong due to its elasticity combined with toughness
In the wild Toatoa is often found in areas difficult to access so the timber has never been trialled for potential uses, but it is considered that both bark and wood will exhibit similar properties to Tanekaha
Native lowland tree species suffered historical decline because of logging, and clear-felling for farming. That brought Toatoa under threat, but since native logging has now ceased, this beautiful native is in relative health with population numbers significantly increased since the 1970s

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