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Keeping a “foot on the throat” of wilding pines
23 April 2026
From the Keen family’s front door, the hills tell a story, one of invasion, persistence, and a farmer who refuses to let wilding pines swallow his family’s legacy.
Jeff Keen remembers when the back block of the 870ha Tomogalak Gorge and neighbouring Cattle Flat Station in northern Southland were almost void of wilding pines. The slopes dotted with a few pine trees and patches of scrub, and so distinctive that, hunting as a teenager, he and his late brother used it as a rendezvous point. “Meet you at the pine trees,” they’d say.
Today, that memory carries a sting. What felt like a harmless landmark in the late 1980s became the gateway to an invasion in the early 2000s. Wind-borne wilding Pinus contorta seedlings spread fast, faster than anyone imagined, turning tussock faces into forests of pine.
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