A local twitter friend who is a geologist, archaeologist and historian has uncovered the history of a former isolated native forest that is now a town. It's quite a tale from an accidental find of an 1847 map with a coloured patch representing a forest, to a 3D virtual forest in Blender matched to an 1859 watercolour painting.

The forest appears to be have been an isolated patch of about 2.2 Hectares in a sea of tussock grass - mostly various related species of this tussock Chionochloa. The trees were most probably kahikatea, a podocarp (seed with a foot) that were viewed as nearly useless by European settlers until "until it was discovered that it did not taint food" , thus much of Aotearoa New Zealand's magnificent forests became packaging. Outside of a fifth of the land surface that is National Park, healthy native forest is increasingly rare, occurring as patches of a few kilometres to a few hundred square metres - staggering on as remnants. Here's WUX (facebook video) speaking from within another podocarp remnant, this time totora in the Wairarapa in the North Island. WUX makes a lot of content on NZ native forests, Māori culture and history ... and Māori food as he's a chef with a food truck in Masterton.