Appearance
The gum varied in color depending on the condition of the original tree. It also depended on where the gum had formed and how long it had been buried. Colors ranged from chalky-white, through red-brown to black; the most prized was a pale gold, as it was hard and translucent. The size of each lump also varied greatly. Swamps tended to yield the small nuggets known as "chips", whereas the hillsides tended to produce larger lumps. The majority were the size of acorns, although some were found which weighed a few pounds; the largest (and rarest) were reported to weigh half a hundredweight. Kauri gum shares a few characteristics with amber, another fossilised resin found in the Northern Hemisphere, but where amber can be dated as millions of year old, carbon-dating suggests the age of most kauri gum is a few thousand years.
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—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)