Walker’s Bush, near the top of Mountain Road, is named after W.R. Walker. In the late 1920s he swapped land with the local council in order to preserve the handful of large kauri remaining in the bush [1].

The biggest tree was reported to have a girth of 31 ft (9.44 m) in 1927 and was given the title of the largest tree near Auckland. Sale repeated this claim in Quest for the Kauri [2].

Of the large kauri in the bush, the now-permanently closed track went past two: A fine tree around 2.5 m dbh [3], 36 m tall with a spread of 25 m (as per 2019 LIDAR data) that is some 300 m down from the start of the track. That tree was often mistaken for the Walker Kauri, as the track narrowed and became more obscure down to the big tree at the top of the gully of the Opunuku stream.

With a diameter around 3 m, a height of 46 m and a magnificent crown 36 m across, the tree, in apparent fine health before the permanent closure of the track in 2017, ranks as the local champion kauri in Auckland City, ahead of the less than healthy Bishop tree in Titirangi (AR/1444).

Hidden away by the landscape and the rāhui due to the Phytophthora agathidicida toxin, the tree is similar in stature to the more famous Square Kauri near Tapu, Coromandel (COR/1364). Mr Walker, so fond of the bush that bears his name, had his ashes scattered near the tree [4].

[Smillie, 2022]

1. Auckland Sun VOLUME I, ISSUE 221, 7 DECEMBER 1927, PAGE 13
2. E.V. Sale, Quest for the Kauri, 1978
3. Auckland Botanical Society Newsletter 5(2) 1948
4. Auckland Botanical Society Newsletter 33(2) 1976