Northland tōtara

Tōtara was once one of the most common trees in lowland Aotearoa. Māori valued it above nearly every other species. Waka were hollowed from it, whare were framed with it, and many of the country's most treasured carvings were made from it.

When European settlement accelerated in the 1840s, those same qualities made it the default settler timber too. Houses, bridges, wharves, fence posts, all of it. By 1900, mature tōtara had been cleared from most lowland landscapes.

Over the following century the law slowly caught up. The 1993 Forests Amendment Act added Part 3A, which is the main framework governing how indigenous timber can be harvested on private land today. Today there's only a small tōtara industry: a tightly regulated harvest, a research pilot, and a handful of people working to build it back, but in a sustainable way.

The Tōtara Industry Pilot, or TIP, was a two-year research pilot based in Northland between 2018 and 2020. Its purpose was simple but ambitious: work out whether a regulated native-timber industry, based on regenerating farm tōtara, could actually work. Technically, economically, and environmentally.

TIP was a collaboration between Te Uru Rākau (MPI's indigenous forestry team), Scion, and three Northland partners: Te Taitokerau Māori Forestry Inc, Tāne's Tree Trust, and Northland Inc. Paul Quinlan and Peter Berg, who you'll meet again later on this page, drove much of the practical work. The kaupapa is "sturdy tōtara, sustainable communities."

The pilot concluded in 2020 and confirmed a viable pathway. Since then, Te Taitokerau Maori Forestry Inc. has been keen to see the work move from study into active commercial harvest on Northland farms, with Māori landowners and entities at the centre. That's the pathway we're building, in partnership with Tāne's Tree Trust, the Northland Tōtara Working Group, and Northland landowners including Tapuaetahi Inc. and Oromahoe Farm Trust.

Native timber on private land in New Zealand can only be harvested in accordance with Part 3A of the Forests Act. In practice, that framework is what separates legal native timber from anything else you might come across.

The governing idea is sustainable management (based on maintaining continuous forest cover with the full range of natural values). No clear-felling of native forest. Single trees or small groups are selected and removed. The canopy stays, the forest keeps regenerating, and the stand continues to function as forest, with natural values, indefinitely. That's the principle. The rules around harvest rates, cutting cycles, and protected areas are there to make sure that's what actually happens on the ground.

The indigenous forestry team within Te Uru Rākau, MPI, administers the provisions of the Act. Before any cutting happens, a plan or permit has to be approved. Only registered sawmills can process the timber. MPI advisers can inspect at any point, and every log is tied to a specific approval by docket. It's slow, documented, and specific on purpose.

Northland tōtara isn't a scarce timber in the usual sense. Across the region there are around 200,000 hectares of native scrub and forest on freehold farmland, and tōtara is the predominant canopy tree across much of it. It isn't a remnant. It's regeneration.

Most of it grew back on hill country, erosion-prone slopes, and riparian margins. Not on prime pasture, not planted, not tended. For a lot of Northland farmers, tōtara is simply there, coming up on areas of marginal farm land. Some treat it as a weed.

That's the resource a regulated and sustainable new industry is built on. When continuous-cover harvest does happen, the volume taken in any one entry is small by design. Harvests are controlled to be less than the natural growth increase of the forest, meaning the forest keeps growing in volume. This isn't a race to the bottom of the resource. It's a managed return on something that's been quietly coming back for decades.

Our tōtara comes from two Northland farms and three working relationships. The land is held by Tapuaetahi Incorporation, on the Purerua Peninsula in the Bay of Islands, and Oromahoe Farm Trust. Both are working farms, held through Māori incorporation and trust structures, where tōtara has regenerated strongly across hill country following early land clearances.

On the land side, we work directly with Mariao Hohaia, Executive Manager of Tapuaetahi Incorporation. On the forestry and milling side, with Li Legler of Horowai Timbers, who handles felling, extraction, and milling in Northland. Paul Quinlan, through Tāne's Tree Trust and the Northland Tōtara Working Group, holds the technical and relational chain together, applying decades of work on native forestry to the day-to-day decisions a project like this turns on.

It's not a complicated relationship, but it matters. The framing Mariao works within is kaitiakitanga, the guiding principle of his people's relationship with this land. The framing Paul works within is the "He tōtara tūturu, he iwi tū tonu" vision behind the TIP pilot. Our framing is simpler: for an Innate table to have a story worth telling, there has to be environmental outcomes and people upstream whose story is worth linking to. These are those people.

In October 2025, Tapuaetahi Incorporation contacted Paul with a problem. A run of tōtara on Te Whangae Farm had been felled under the powerlines. Without a plan, they'd stay on the hill as slash, the leftover trunk and branch material that gets left where it falls. Mariao wondered if they could be salvaged as they had been working towards a project with Innate.  Paul came back with a proposal to salvage the usable logs, cut them to length, and get them out. Because the logs were tōtara, any that were to be milled had to sit under the same Part 3A approvals as any other native harvest. Salvage from private land carries no exemption under the Forests Act.

On 10 November 2025 the extraction crew went in. The conditions were hard: big logs, steep ground, slash across the hill from where the trees had been felled. Paul sent through photos that evening. That stock now sits in our timber shed in Christchurch. Every tōtara table we make from this harvest comes from those logs.

For the customer

A tōtara table from us is a piece of furniture and a piece of a chain. You can point to the farm it came from, the people who hold that land, the month it was harvested, and the approval that made the harvest legal. That's not marketing. That's what Part 3A produces, log by log.

For the forest and the farms

When regenerating farm tōtara has economic value as managed timber, something shifts on Northland hill country. The trees become an asset. Landowners have reason to retain and value stands that might otherwise be cleared or left as unmanaged scrub - and even invest in sustainable management.

A commercial harvest isn't a conservation act in itself, but a regulated continuous-cover forestry model is one of the few mechanisms that enables landowners to realise some value from keeping and managing the stands of regenerating native forest on their land. For Māori entities like Tapuaetahi, it also means forestry revenue and work on their land, for their people.

For us and the wider industry

There isn't much of a functioning sustainable native timber industry in New Zealand yet. What exists is small, careful, and reinventing itself after a century of over-cut followed by decades of near-total ban. Every table we make from Northland tōtara is a small signal that there's a market for this timber, produced this way. It supports a future for sustainable indigenous forestry.

We're one small participant, not the centre of anything. But a new, tightly regulated, sustainable native industry needs buyers who'll commit, makers who'll work the timber properly, and projects on the ground to show that it can be done. We want to be all three.

Northland tōtara is a medium-density timber with a fine, even grain. What we work with is predominantly sapwood, the paler, lighter-toned part of the log. Heartwood is warmer and redder. Both are tōtara, and we use both. The samples pictured show the range.

For a dining table, the properties that matter most are hardness, stability, and durability. Tōtara sits on the softer side of NZ natives: softer than rimu and kauri. Firm enough for daily use and easy to hand-sand and refinish if you ever want to. It moves very little as humidity changes, so wide tops stay flat and joints stay tight.

Historically, tōtara's reputation is built on its heartwood, one of the most durable softwoods in the world, with posts known to last in the ground for decades. Much of that durability comes from totarol, a natural anti-fungal compound unique to tōtara. It's the same resin that underlies a small extractives industry in New Zealand. In a dining room, that kind of durability is over-spec. What matters indoors is stability and longevity under finish, and on both counts tōtara performs well. Our kiln drying and finishing schedule is what carries the sapwood through from raw timber to finished table.