As the plaque at its base notes, “This tree is regarded as a surviving example of the vegetation that existed when Auckland was built.”

The tree was first recorded in Dr L. H. Millener’s 1955 List of Historic Trees of Auckland, where it was described as one of “a few venerable kānuka [that] persist from those that must have looked out over Auckland from their scrub-covered ridge when the very first tents sprang up on the shore.”

It was later documented in the 1971 NZ Forest Research Institute Mensuration Report No. 16, which stated that this tree and other kānuka in the Auckland Domain “almost certainly survived from the days when Auckland was a scrub-covered wilderness.”

The tree was also listed as Tree No. 41 on the 1971 Auckland City List of 100 Notable Trees prepared by the Civic Trust, and later featured as Tree 16 in Burstall and Sale’s Great Trees of New Zealand (1984), which noted that it “almost certainly is a survivor of one of the most common species growing in the area of scrub and fern-covered wilderness on which Auckland was built.”

(Cadwallader, B. G., 2015)