Tree Stuff Blog
Dialatree -Thirty Years as an Online Nursery - by Ben Gaia, www.dialatree.co.nz


www.dialatree.co.nz

I had grown trees for about five years and was selling them mainly to dairy farmers. In 1996 it rained for a year every day on the West Coast and I needed an indoor activity. I had run a small backyard tree nursery growing trees for farms in Motueka and now in Hokitika. My specialty was growing organically, and finding trees for food or timber that handled difficult, cold, windy, wet conditions anywhere in New Zealand, by field testing the trees here in Westland. I grew natives and exotics, learning all the time about trees. That year had shocking weather and the dreadful "horizontal sleet month" we had in October 2025 comes close to the feel of it. Back in 1996 computers had suddenly become usable, with Windows 95, and the internet was a thing like a large library plus newspaper. I could see its potential for marketing, encouraged by my Dad, who was always an early adopter of technology.

I started a small garden centre in town, and advertised in the local paper on a weekend, targeting farmers and lifestylers. I was growing as many trees as I knew how - but the market was local and limited. A light bulb went on in my head. I doodled a picture on an envelope: a phone receiver with its curly wire and the name "dial a tree". A new marketing approach was needed. I would become an online shop for mail order trees. In the lashing days and months of rain I learnt a new language: "HTML". This is a simple code for writing web pages and luckily, thirty years on it still works on any device. So in 1996 dialatree went online.




Animations were the thing then, but now they are seen as too "busy".

I designed and wrote simple web pages, linking my site through other sites and groups such as Tree Crops NZ. I also wrote a column for Growing Today" a glossy lifestyle block magazine, and for the rural delivery paper "Canterbury Farming". This was a way to get that website out there into the print media. Having a website got the phone number and email address right around the country, with fuzzy digital camera pictures of blurred rootrainer macrocarpas, on a tidy woodchip background (to look professional) and a price list that could easily be updated.




"Dialatree supports an organic and ge-free future. "



Obviously the internet took off, and dialatree was there early on. Sales increased three fold and gradually spread over the North and South Islands. After a few years two thirds of my customers were in the North Island, reflecting where the population lives.

When Trade Me came along it made having a shopfront really easy. The fees were not so astronomical then, and there was a live feedback community of Kiwis to debate and discuss the platform, where many good new ideas were picked up by Trade Me and the site was improved by its users. I am delighted that trade me still exists, but it is now overseas owned, expensive, and not the live community of bright sparks it was. It can be glitchy too, but it is still well trusted. "Ping" automated banking has certainly freed up my time as a seller from checking on payments. And some people would prefer to trade through the platform for security rather than through email, (which is even easier btw. Just email us, folks!)




No more copper! says Katy the Katydid

During and after 2019 and the Pandemic, people got even more used to shopping online and now it has become people's first option for buying stuff. The move away from driving and shopping in town has been transforming townscapes and gutting city centres world wide. The upside for business is we can all now be cottage industries, doing e-commerce on a laptop from a retreat in the Himalayas or Tahiti. Or indeed on the wild West Coast, here with my larger backyard nursery growing bigger numbers of hardy trees.

Aside from the Inter Web, the tree market has changed too over thirty years. Forestry and trees were actually more popular in the 90s. It was a given. "Plant trees and save the world." I was always trying to prise people off monocultural pinus radiata, and learning more about growing trees through work. I was doing forestry contracting and establishing organic mixed coppicing forests. Also the plan was to grow food somehow, as a "lifestyle" experiment. In the timber world, trees go in and out of fashion like clothes. Early on it was alders, eucalyptus, poplars, and lusitanicas as the new wonder species. Poplars won the battle by being easiest to shove in the paddock. Eucalypts got frosted, then got too big and blew over. Serious wood people turned to longer rotation trees, Leyland cypress, Macrocarpa, Japanese cedar, and finally, Redwoods. In 2026 carbon forestry is seen as a waste of land (not if you still harvest the trees!) and that visionary fever for redwoods has vanished. On the plus side "Lifestyling" has gone ballistic! So there is huge potential for niche timber species, coppice woods like ash and oak, Liquidamber, Italian alders, Lawson cypress; native species like Manuka, Kahikatea and Kauri; also for weird fruits, usually from the Andes, like guavas, feijoas, tamarilloes, peaches, gooseberries, and white alpine strawberries. The Lifestyle Block Magazine column has morphed into the Dialatree Blog.

I have had to pivot a few times over thirty years of marketing and follow the trends as well as trying to set them.

Lifetime of a Tree

It has been an awesome privilege to grow trees for all those people around the country I have never met, knowing your corner of the land is enhanced by some shade, or hanging crab apples, improving our existence. We owe so much to the trees... after all we came from the forest before humans could even walk. We were living in the trees and that's why we feel so good when we walk and sit amongst them. Here's to another thirty years of dialatree!


Westland Peacherines - after years of patience



We grow fruit and timber trees in the extreme climate of the South Island. Explore our mail order nursery for organic fruit and forestry trees.

Back to dialatree - and tree blog archive - www.dialatree.co.nz