eucalyptus

Look at this!

2011-09-02T10:51:00.002+10:00

Found on The Guardian site this morning.

I decided after a long absence to renew my acquaintance with trees and record them here. I will put a few on the site over the next few weeks.

Kevin Brewer

Ain't misbehavin'

2010-09-06T19:06:00.004+10:00

'Tis an odd thing in this tree business that causes one wonder at how the world works its ways so mysteriously that my daughters, adrift from me by the unfathomable workings of their mother's mind, should turn up in an English village in Derbyshire with the view of a Spotted Gum, E. maculata, on a slight rise across the road from my youngest's bedroom window. Two days after I took these photographs it snowed for the last time in the early spring of 2010. So these trees-there is apparently several others in the vicinty along the private drive to a local manor.

The Spotted Gum is an odd choice for a tree transplanted to a place where it remains leaved while every other tree in the place is denuded from the late autumn. The green and grey is perhaps more aesthetically pleasing in a village such as this, a grey stone and slatey place in the typical Midlands style of in a gully stretched along an upwards trending road. This is a place where for more than half a year the place lacks any sign of treed life, and even the 1200 year old yew in the churchyard with its stiff placidity, seems more lively than this gum.
A month later I spoke to the farmer of these few acres as he let his sheep into the field, and he told me that a previous owner of the place had an affection for Australia, where he had lived for a few years, that made him bring some seeds back to England, of which this tree is one. The barrier around the base is obviously to protect the base of the tree, although not even sheep, after a long winter cooped up in a barn would hazard a gnaw at the tart bark.

This tree is distributed in Australia, apart from the street trees we see in all our cities, along the coast from Bundaberg in the region of the Tropic of Capricorn (lat. 25S), to around the NSW-Victorian border near the Victorian town of Orbost (Lat. 37S). So this tree likes warm and wet, favouring summer rain. In its natural environment it flowers between May and September, or over the southern winter. I am now waiting on my daughter's observations as to the flowering time of this tree. I expect it to flower in the late autumn, before it gets too cold.

While we are on the subject...

2010-05-19T02:57:00.007+10:00

Here's one I prepared earlier....

Here is an even younger me-1967-the car belongs to a friend of mine from what my children call 'the olden days'. The picture was taken in the south west of Western Australia near the town of Walpole. The tree is a Red Tingle (Eucalyptus jacksonii ). I have always thought it was a karri (E. diversicolor), but that was because when I was young I didn't pay much attention to the sort of detail necessary to describe a tree. I have not been back to see this tree in 40 years, so I am not sure whether you can park your car in it now, but I would imagine not. The world has moved on from that sort of vandalism. Jacksonii grows up to 60m and has a very large buttressed base of up to 16m. The tree is in the Walpole-Nornalup National Park, an area of Western Australia in the south west which has a high rainfall, up to 40 inches a year in parts.
Nowadays there are tree top walks in the area to keep people's dirty shoes out of the undercover in an attempt to stop the spread of phytophthoria cinnamomi, or dieback. See: http://www.dec.wa.gov.au/content/view/213/548/1/3/ for more info. Including maps and a discussion of management. E. Jacksonii doesn't appear to get effected by the disease, although Eucalyptus marginata – Jarrah- is susceptible. See here for a list of WA species susceptible to the disease: http://www.dieback.org.au/go/what-is-dieback/susceptible-species .
I visited this area twice, once as the tourist pictured and once while we were revising the national mapping for the area. The mapping exercise allowed less time to marvel at the sheer scale of the trees, but we got to see a lot more of them.

Home and Away

2010-05-18T22:54:00.002+10:00

The picture shows me standing next to a boab tree (Adansonia gregorii) near Derby, WA, in the dry season of 1968. I was in the army at the time, and the Survey Unit of which I was a member was in the Kimberley of Western Australia doing some basic control work for 250,000 mapping of the area. We were camped on the Derby airstrip. The day this was taken was probably our day off, and we were visiting various highlights of the district, this being the only one I can remember. The tree was hollow inside and had been used at some points in its life as a gaol. Since I am less than 2 metres tall, I would estimate the diameter of the tree at more than 4 metres, or about 12 -14 feet. It wasn't a particularly lively tree-the leaf cover wasn't much-but the tree was very old. Some researchers propose the boab, which came from Africa, was brought to Australia in the migration out of Africa more than 70,000 years ago, and can't see an accidental landing of seeds from the sea. See http://www.uq.edu.au/nuq/jack/Boab Origins.html for some discussion on the matter, particularly the relationship between the boab and Bradshaw style Aboriginal paintings. As for me, I no longer look like that, and probably in shape look more like the tree.

Climbing trees...

2009-05-13T17:22:00.002+10:00

Like to climb trees? Try this site, it's fabulous. And you can take the kids, they apparently love it.

The tree inside...

2009-04-16T12:12:00.002+10:00

Here's a bit about a man becoming his own carbon sink:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/5152953/Surgeons-find-fir-tree-growing-inside-patients-lung.html

I'm not sure what to make of this, but if you look closely at the shots on the monitor in the fillum you can see a fly appearing to crawl over the flesh. I want to know whether the fly was on the monitor or the opened chest.

Old trees...

2009-04-12T12:34:00.005+10:00

There was an article in The Age the other day -11th April-about an old mulberry tree in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern which was grown from a cutting taken from a tree George Bernard Shaw planted Malvern UK in 1936. The cutting has prospered but the original was blown down in a storm. There are now intentions of replacing the original with a cutting from the cutting.

In the way these things do, it reminded me of a feast I had as a child in a mulberry tree, the oldest exotic tree in South Australia, a mulberry tree planted in 1836 at Reeves Point near Kingscote on Kangaroo Island. This tree is now approaching its 175th anniversary and is still fruiting. That particular day the neighbour's sons, my brother and I spent several hours eating mulberries. We ate so many our mouths were purple it seems now for days. None of us ate too many, it's not possible to eat too many mulberries. Fruit was expensive in the late 50s, so a free feed was that, and very welcome. (Crayfish were expensive too, my father used to buy them from the fishermen for ten bob, big ones, the size they no longer grow.) There's a nice picture of the Kangaroo Island tree on Google Earth.

This Yorke Peninsula mulberry tree is also connected to me, although I have nevereaten fruit from it.
This tree would probably predate the Shaw tree mentioned above. The ruin behind the tree is my paternal grandfather's house, built of stone found on the land, plugged together with sand and cement. My family occupied the land in 1912 and left after the banks terminated their mortgage in the early 1930s. The house, and my great grandmother's neighbouring house were built by my grandfather and his brother. The trees are now neglected.
Lichen, dry at the time of my visit, encrusts the bark on the south side of the tree.

The tree is in a small patch of ground which hasn't been ploughed since the land was built on, hence it is grassy, with weedy species like wild oats. The large object behind is a piece of an old water tank.
This tree is still fruiting too. The picture was taken in the spring of 2007. It appears from the date it was very late at night, an indication of bad photographic process more likely: I didn't turn off the date/time stamp. I took a few cuttings from the tree to try and strike them, but it was too late in the spring. This year I will be back in the same are and will take some more.

Black Saturday

2009-04-02T21:31:00.008+11:00

In yesterday's blog I mentioned Mountain ash (E. regnans), the tallest tree ever grown, and how the Back Friday 1939 trees were already pushing 80 metres. The above, from where it came I have no recollection now but I think it was from our morning daily paper The Age, is a man blacking out at the base of tree after the great bushfires passed through that country during the weeks after the 7th February 2009 fires-now known as Black Saturday in keeping with a very long tradition that goes back to 1851 when Black Thursday -February 6th-when a bush fire burnt an estimated 5 million hectares, 12 million acres or about 19000 sq. miles.

Wikipedia says of that day: "The year preceeding the fires was exceptionally hot and dry and this trend continued into the summer of 1851. On Black Thursday, a northerly wind set in early and the temperature in Melbourne was reported to have peaked at 47.2 degrees C (117 degrees F) at 11:00am. This is the hottest temperature ever recorded in the city—although it has never been an official record, as the Bureau of Meteorology had not been established at the time.^[2] The north wind was so strong that thick black smoke reached northern Tasmania, creating a murky mist, resembling a combination of smoke and fog.^[3] A ship 20 miles (32km) out to sea came under burning ember attack and was covered in cinders and dust. In the evening, a cool change brought with it cooler conditions and light rain." Below is an image from the firezone, square miles of sticks and ash, a blue haze.
This description is almost exactly of what happened on 7th February 2009. Except we had had 3 or 4 days the previous week where the temperature was in the 40s, which had dried everything out. When Eucalypts are stressed by drought or lack of water they adopt a somewhat deciduous life style dropping leaves, bark and limbs, and falling over as their roots strees past breaking. (This happened to a tree in the front yard of the apartment where I was staying that Saturday and we had to remove it from the road. The day was like standing next to a very hot forge). The air temperature was over 46C and the the flash point of eucalyptus oil is about 50C. The hills were an alarmingly beautiful tinge of blue, in other words the air was full of volatiles. When the flash came the place went up. THESE FIRES ARE HOT: 1200C. They were moving in places at up to 100km an hour. From my doorstep nothing much seemed to be happening, a bit of smoke to the north and to the east, unlike other days other years when the place was bathed in smoke for weeks.

This man is looking at the effect of a bushfire on the aluminium bits in his car. His rims have melted and flowed away. What would happen to an engine block in the same circumstances? Firetrucks these days don't have much aluminium, after the Linton fires of 2 December 1998 where two trucks were trapped and the aluminium cabin burnt, killing five firemen.

Someone I heard talking on the wireless during the fires said they had seen a small car -mainly plastic and aluminium alloys-almost melt in front of them, and on the news on tv one night I saw a four wheel drive with part of the bumper bar melted off.

These pictures were found mainly on the Guardian, The Age, and ePosVriende's blog. There is a lot of material and images on this disaster on the net. And we are having a Royal Commission into the fires, so there will be a lot more.

NCIS

2009-04-02T10:35:00.003+11:00

A scene from an episode of NCIS, one of my favourite tv shows. I think it is in series 4. The black car at the foot of the is on its way to a stake out at a nearby warehouse somewhere in Virginia. A reasonably tight shot, but the sunshine in thr bg is not the only problem with this shot. Virginia it ain't: NCIS is shot in California. Smack bang in the middle of the screen is what we on this side of the world call a gum tree.

Here is Agent Ziva aiming at the warehouse, just before the team launch their assault.

This is not the first gum tree I have seen in the movies either. NCIS has a few, and I will go back and look for them. Any film shot in Australia is going to contain lots of them, but I think the it was either The Big Red One or The Thin Red Line where the denouement of the film, set in Europe, takes place beside a tree lined ditch, and every one of those trees is a gum tree.

The tree in the NCIS shot is E. leucoxylon, Blue Gum.

Britain's tallest tree

2009-04-01T18:50:00.003+11:00

BBC news item I found today about a 60metre tree being Britain's tallest found so far. The clip shows how tall trees are measured. Ignore the ad for the Philippines that may come on first. The man mentions some redwoods which are also contenders. Which means imported trees.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/7975434.stm

To our Australian ears 60 metres isn't bad as a tree, but remember some of the mountain ash (E. regnans) that seeded after Black Friday 1939 are already pushing 80 metres. The trees of that cohort that survived Black Saturday (Feb. 7th 2009) will make it well past that height. Redwoods have attained thier heights over a couple millenia in climates of 2500mm of rainfall a year. These mountain ash were seeded in the early to mid 20th century.

This statement of course gets us into the tallest tree competition that agitates many-myself inluded-and that brings me to Bob Beale's book "If Trees could Speak: stories of Australia's greatest trees" ISBN9781741142761. Beale mentions three 1926 generation ash trees he and Brett Mifsud measured at 85 metres. he also mentions an 1872 report by Inspector of State Forests William Ferguson, who measured a fallen tree that straddled a tributary of the Watts river from the roots to the extreme end at 435 feet, the tree was 18 feet in diameter at 5 feet and the end break was 3 feet in diameter. Ferguson estimated the original heith of the tree at 500 feet (152 m).

Down by the seaside...

2008-11-05T19:23:00.005+11:00

Avicennia marina -the Grey mangrove. This tree is on the eastern shore of Macleay Island, about 100 metres from my sister's block of land. The tide is out, but the water is still close, blue and warm. The edge of the small bay is covered with these mangroves, with small gaps between trees from which it is possible to launch one's boat to do a spot of fishing, an activity about which my sister's family is very enthusiastic.

Another tree nearby, showing the tree structure, branching out from a short stump.

This is the stump of the tree.
Leaves.
The roots growing out of the mud are called pneumatophores. They filter much of the salt from the water.
Part of a tree, showing the bark. This reminds me of the curlew, which looks like this:

The other side...

2008-11-05T19:06:00.003+11:00

Eucalyptus bridgesiana, Swamp apple or Swamp box. These two trees grow on the south side of my sister's block on Macleay Island in Moreton Bay, Qld, near where their proposed house will be built. The right hand tree will be removed, it is an ugly tree anyway and shows signs of insect damage, but they will keep the tree on the left which will help screen the house from the neighbour's.
These leaves are young, showing signs of being ovate. You can see some caterpillar damage on the edge of one of the leaves.
Trunk, showing bark, which is similar to the neighbouring E. microcorys. The soil here is a sandy loam which appears to be quite good. Re-seeded clumps of Themeda triandra, kangaroo grasshave sprung up on the block which has been cleared and the soil surface disturbed by considerable levelling.

Island life...

2008-11-05T18:39:00.003+11:00

This is Tallowwood, Eucalyptus microcorys, an interesting specimen of which is on my sister's block of land on Macleay Island in Moreton Bay in Queensland. This tree will eventually be removed, logged in fact, and probably end up as floor boards or furniture in the house they intend to build on the block. The tree is about 30m high, the butt is not quite a metre in diameter. As can be seen above the tree has just finished flowering. The flowers are usually a creamy white.

This is the tree from the front of the black. It is surprisingly straight from the ground to about 15m, before it branches. The branches are heavy at the base, but are short. There is no sign the tree sheds branches.
The tree bark is described as "rough and persistent" to the branches, with long fibres.
This is a log from a Tallow wood which was on the neighbouring block. The tree was cut down and rolled over to form part of the boundary between two blocks. The timber is apparently somewhat slippery, and difficult to work because of it. Hence tallowwood. But it apparently is a good timber for flooring and furniture. There is no reason why these logs shouldn't be sliced and diced and walked and sat upon.
Here is the next generation, most of which are going to be weeded for any garden my sister can make.

the past is a different country...

2008-08-18T17:28:00.002+10:00

This picture was taken in the forests east of where I live in the early 1980s. I am the one on the right with a beanie and my hands in my pockets. The tree stump is the remains of E. regnans cut many years ago. The axeman's steps are very clear in this photograph, he cut them, pushed a plank into the highest, stood on it and cut the tree down. The timber would have been used for building, flooring or fencing. This is a relatively young stump. The tallest tree ever measured on the ground in these forests was 425 feet long, and the top was said to have been damaged by lightning. Regnans needs fire to regenerate, but is not epicormic, unlike many other eucalypts.

Acacias...

2008-08-18T16:11:00.004+10:00

It is that time of the year again when the acacia begin to flower. We know it is late winter, and the yellow cheers us up as we go for our daily walks in the scrub in the loacl parks. The acacia seem to be in better humour than they were last year, perhaps because this winter has been colder and a lot wetter than the last. A couple of weeks ago it snowed less than 5km from this park, and for the benefit of northerners, that is very unusual. The eqivalent would be 45C in London. I think this is acacia dealbata, the silver wattle.

The odd thing about this flowering there are very few nectar eating birds about, especially the small ones. The park is called Bellbird Dell, and the bird it is named after are very aggressive and hunt out weaker less aggressive birds. They have, however, a beautiful song with a very pure tone.

I was on my way to the tram station when I saw these trees, and stopped to photograph them.

Notice the colour of the pool under this tree. This is storm water from the park and from neighbouring streets. In summer any remaining water will develope an algal bloom.

These trees seem to flower later the further south one goes. In the northern reaches of the State they would have been in blossom a month before these photos were taken-2 weeks ago-and will flower later in the higher, colder country. The Australian Alps are under a metre of snow at the moment, so it will be October before the acacia flower there.

Close up of the blossom. These flowers have quite as sweet scent. If you are asthmatic, don't stick your nose anywhere near this. Most Australian flowering plants are great pollinators and some people believe them to be highly allergenic. The pollen is fairly heavy so is not usually carried on the wind, unlike grasses, rye grass is a particularly nasty grass, and so gets up one's nose with some difficulty. Not being allergic to anything, I like acacia, and I like particularly the idea of a movement of yellow across the countryside as the flowering front moves south.

The trunk of these trees is slightly rough, but also quite tough. The bark is thin, and was often used for tanning leather, the timber is useful though not much used.

timber 2....

2008-08-18T15:13:00.013+10:00

This the back of the house now. It is unfinished as yet, it hasn't been clad, although we were plastering the day I took this. Plastering is a trade that requires equanimity, it is designed to test friendships to the limit, and the sound proofing of the building. Fortunately the house is fairly soundproof, the air inside was electric some times.
Sunny winter's day, birch still leaning. There is a simple reason for this tree leaning over. Near the corner of the house was a 30m liquid amber tree, just under the piles of timber in the picture below.
This tree was removed to make room for this extension. The birch had grown up in the shade of the liquid amber, and to get to the light had to grow outwards. Only when the liquid amber was removed did the birch become a problem. Besides it was not a healthy tree, the possums had eaten the top shoots and the tree was dying from the extremities back, the core of the trunk was rotted out, and the roots were intertwined with the remnants of the liquid amber roots, which were removed by this machine.
This is a good way to make mulch.

The north wall of the house is 4m to roof, double glazed and with several layers of wall insulation under the plaster. The large overhang is supposed to shade the wall in summer. We will see. The metal sheet cladding is not on yet. The black lining is 18mm chipboard, painted with bituminous paint for water proofing.
This day a man and a machine pulled up at the neighbour's house.
The sun came out for awhile...
A man began to climb the tree...
Higher...
And then he started his chain saw...
Down came the tree, branches first...
Then gradually the trunk was whittled back...
More and more. The rain had set in by now...
Not much to go...
Going, going...

Gone.

timber...

2008-08-18T14:50:00.007+10:00

This what I have being doing for most of the year, apart from recovering from a broken marriage. For obvious reasons I have left my previous vocation-house husband-and ventured out into some sort of paid employment. I have been the labourer for a friend who took long service leave, and leave of his senses, to demolish the rear of his house, and rebuild it. Demolition took a week as it was hot, work was all by hand, and the section of the house was held together by a large number of nails. There was a dead possum in the ceiling space-if fell on someone's head-and a lot of filth accumulated over the last 30 years. This shot shows the result of the demolition: half a house.
We then built the form work for the waffle slab he was laying. Note the leaning birch over the side fence.
The sab is ready for concrete. 100m2, about 15 cubic metres.

Freshly poured and finished. The concreters did the levelling and smoothing by hand and eye.

Sometime later the framework is up. The birch is still leaning. Next post.....

the horrors...

2008-04-11T09:28:00.004+10:00

Just found this English site. The same happens here in Australia where I live; in the leafy eastern suburbs of Melbourne as well as everywhere else.

I've been busy lately so haven't been posting. I have been working for a friend who is rebuilding the back of his house; renovating is the great Australian hobby, more than fishing and drinking beer, and we have been using a lot of timber. Soon I will post a few pictures to show the demolition and framework.

2008-01-07T15:49:00.002+11:00

Tower Hill is a nested maar type of dormant volcano, notice it isn't extinct. More here. The treed area in the centre of the picture are a number of volcanic cones, the flat area in the foreground is part of the crater, and in wetter times is a large lake. Apparently the area was occupied by humans at the tme of the most recent eruptions between 20 and 30000 years ago. This area is part of a significant volcanic zone stretching from the south east of South Australia to central Victoria, within which the most recent eruptions were around Mt Gambier in SA about 4800 years ago. Tower Hill was declared a National Park in 1892. It was painted by a number of important artists including Eugen von Guerard, whose painting of 1855 is considered accurate enough to be used as a document of vegetation types, and which has guided revegetation from the 1950s onwards. Some where along the line they introduced this little animal.
This koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) is sitting in a tree in the Tower Hill National park near Koroit in Victoria's south west. I climbed the highest of the peaks in the park one day and on the way down was directed by some other visitors to this rather cute sight. We all take great pleasure in watching these animals, which are protected both by the law and national sentiment. Even when they piss on Ministers of the Government and ruin their expensive suits, we laugh, then hand a few over to zoos elsewhere in the world.
Koalas like a small subset of the 800 odd species of eucalypts and related trees. Manna gum (E. viminalis) and Swamp gum (E. ovata) are the main components of their diet, although they are known to browse up to 50 species and even eat from other tree species. They are fairly territorial and have favourite trees, they are social, but they eat up to a kilogram of leaves a day, and eucalypts are not thickly leaved trees, so they can quickly denude a tree. They were not in the park in an earlier European incarnation as grazing land and quarry. They now have eaten out the trees they like, there are vastly greater numbers and the park authorities are playing the ring a roses game of moving numbers to other locations to ease congestion. This is a common problem. I grew up on Kangaroo Island, where a colony of koalas was established in the early 1920s from French Island in Victoria, where, according to Tim Low in his book The New Nature, ISBN 0143001949, they had been taken in 1898. When I was a kid we had to drive a long way over some very rough dirt roads to see a koala, and I remember seeing a couple on one such excursion in the 50s.
This is the environment the koala (centre of picture) is living in. The light coloured trees are food trees. This animal is eating itself out of house and home. Further to the French Island and Kangaroo Island stories, where the animals have also eaten themselves out of trees, according to Lowe one person on French Island in the 20s counted 2300 koalas on a 5 miles stretch of road. 15000 animals have been relocated from French and adjacent Phillip Islands so far, with little net result. The 18 koalas taken to Kangaroo Island had multiplied to more than 5000 70 years later. The locals wanted a cull, they got expensive and selective sterilisation. Koalas were then released up a tree, still eating their way out of house and home. The problem is two fold, political and sentimental. The pollies are gutless, they don't want to do the sensible thing, cull, because it would look bad in the media especially overseas. They won't fund the awareness campaigns to raise the level of debate above the cuteness and national icon level, so we can deal with the problem we created by not managing animal numbers. These animals were food once to the original Australians, they kept numbers in check by roasting them. Kangaroos, emus, possums were also eaten, and now they are all largely protected. I have eaten roo and emu meat, nutritious, low cholesterol meats both. Possums? Give us an open season on the buggers, three days is all we need, let me shoot fat Freddy who lives in my roof, pisses on my ceiling, shits in my nice warm insulation. Save the kangaroo? Save the koala? Only by managing the numbers, like humans once did.Thanks to Tim Low, who opened my eyes.

barking ....

2007-12-15T17:24:00.000+11:00

These are a few of the tree in Woodleigh Crescent, Vermont South, in Melbourne's eastern suburbs. The idea this is a Crescent and that it is in Vermont South not South Vermont (I live in Vermont and the street is south of here) are the result of the no knowledge, no sense and no imagination of developers and local governments. I hate the pretentions of both. However, someone had the good sense many years ago to plant some good trees here and these spotted gum (Corymbia maculata) have now grown to more than 20 metres. This time of the year is deciduous time, the trees are shedding bark everywhere, and I have seen a few branches lying around at the foot of trees too. The bark is interesting for its colour.
A bit of rain and the colour comes out. Mainly grey, orange and pink at the moment.
With some purply pink patches too. The tree below is particularly pink. This method of shedding is called decorticating.
The effect is noticeable from the road, which I why I took these pictures. I was driving up the street in the rain, and was so taken by the colour I stopped to take some of these pictures.

The tree below is pink and grey, and it is not wet, so the colour is very pale and less vivid.
Many people believe eucalypts are an evergreen non-deciduous tree. But they drop branches, leaves, and bark, and in large quantities. At least three people have been killed in recent months by falling branches (see earlier post). lemon scented gums (Corymbia citriodora), according to Seddon, withdraw nutrients from lower branches, which die and drop off, the scar being covered in cambium to close the hole.
Patches of bark detaching from the tree reveal all sorts of effects, including a pale green new bark.
More green. The new bark comes through green or cream. The result is a pile of rubbish around the stump, which, according to George Seddon, is a mulch that prevents competition growing at the foot of the tree, and the trees out-compete anything else in the forest. The rubbish also produces fire-prone ground cover. But here in the leafy suburbs of eastern Melbourne the only fire likely is that under a nice piece of juicy rump and some snags.

roundabout 2 ...

2007-12-15T17:09:00.000+11:00

The roundabout at Carlton (lat. -37 47.68 long. 144 57.78) mentioned in a very early post-18th January this year. These trees are almost a year older, had another year of very low rainfall. I was driving back from having coffee with my mate Dave in North Melbourne yesterday afternoon and got caught in the usual jam at late afternoon home time. The bark on the spotted gum has peeled off showing the yellow creamy colour of the new bark.

12 days, or more...

2007-12-07T22:05:00.000+11:00

This is in the interregnum between the two towers at 55 Collins Street in Melbourne. These trees have very rapid growth at this time of the year. Appearing fully formed and complete with a shiny inedible fruit and spangly lights. The appearance of one tree seems to prompt a plague, they appear everywhere, and cause some mysterious emulatory disease to take hold in the far corners of the world. I have a Swedish home model, an el cheapo from the COOP that fair country, complete with plastic fir that the dog doesn't like-a wonder, given he has destroyed 5 shoes and two couches this week.

Here is another genus of the same plague. This one is a completely transparent silver, and unlikely to require sunlight for photosynthesis. Used to complement the smaller, ungown versions of the first tree pictured.
A set up, perhaps the silvery trees radiate some chemistry that induces growth in the green trees, or perhaps the whole concept radiates some effusion that lightly touches my gag reflex.

The blues, I got the blues...

2007-12-03T14:49:00.000+11:00

This is a paddock is on the eastern side of the road between Burra and Robertstown. The purple flower is that bane of farmers in South Australia, Patterson’s Curse, or Salvation Jane. The beekeepers of the state have got law on their side when they ...anyway I have dealt with this elsewhere. This is a weed, a noxious weed that councils are not allowed to clear because beekeepers need the flowers for pollen. Forget about any environmental concerns, and this stuff is poisonous to the country and to some stock, the bees have it. The weed moves up the roadways, carried on vehicles, then inland to occupy large areas like this paddock.

Rouseabout...

2007-12-03T11:02:00.001+11:00

This is a view from half way up the side of Mt Rouse, just behind the little Western Districts town of Penshurst. Mt Rouse is an extinct volcano, and forms one of the many neat hills that dot this landscape. At the base of the mount is a quarry, at the top a telecoms repeater station. The house just visible among the trees is Kolor, built in 1868 for the squatter, John Twomey. Twomey occupied the area in the 1840s-1850s, the run was small by comparison with most runs in the District, about 9000 acres, but the soils are rich, and Twomey benefitted. Like most squatters who remained after the 1850s Land Acts, he freeholded, then built a suitable house. The house is on the register of the National Estate.

This photograph was taken from below the house to the right of the colour picture above. It is interesting in that the decoration in the middle ground is a an explicit demonstration of 19thC social relations. Aborigines form the lower group, in possum skin rugs, Mr Twomey is higher up, close to the house, with his horse. These are images from the Latrobe library collected during an excursion into the history of the area done as my MA 12 years ago.

The top photograph gives some idea of what the countryside looks like now. We are fortunate in having pictures of what it looked like more than a century ago, in the few years after the house was built. This is the most interesting photograph. It is taken from a similar position to the top photograph and shows the extensive vegetation on the plains. The trees on the plain are mainly E. camaldulensis, Red Gum, with some acacia, I think, on the slopes. The close planting around the house that now obscures the building has yet to be done. Looking over the plains now, it is obvious they have been cleared, although at the time of occupation they were often described as like a gentleman's park. The top photograph indicates some of what that park description entailed. very open woodland of the red gum has been preserved in parts, but faces the problem of little being done for regrowth as the old trees reach the ends of their lives. Stock keep the land cleared as effectively as the Aborigines firestick kept it open in the millenia before European occupation.

While you are at it....

2007-11-07T19:36:00.000+11:00

Try this site too, as much for its variety as for the tree. Go down the page to the right hand side, three pages on trees. Mark, great stuff!!

Oft it happens on a stormy night...

2007-11-07T18:22:00.000+11:00

Type your summary here?

This tragedy was repeated the other day, and seems to be an event almost as common in Australia as a crocodile attack or snake bite.

An old farm boy's worst nightmare...

2007-11-07T18:17:00.000+11:00

This article doesn't surprise me. In the 1870s many farmers claimed rain followed the plough and tried to grow wheat at Farina in South Australia, 1000km north of where it will grow, and where Goyder said it would. He marked a line on a map, the 10" rainfall isohyet, as the northern most limits of successful agriculture in South Australia. The 1870s were very wet, so cropping took place well north of this line, Farina was its most optimistic expression. Come the dry seasons in 1879-1880, it was a very rapid retreat staged by the farmers, to where Goyder had suggested. Really what this article is suggesting, is not that rain follows the plough but flees the axe. And the axe has been very busy in this country, and farmers are very protective of their right to use it. South Australia passed legislation many years ago protecting forest and woodland remnants-scrub-and the bulldozers were at wotk day and night in the weeks and months before the legislation became law. Now we have some science to show that right for what it is. Bob Hawke, as Prime Minister, wanted to plant a billion trees in the 1980s, 50 billion, perhaps 100 billion, should have been the aim. The photo shows Mount Misery on Yorke Peninsula, in the middle of a very large area sewn to barley. Once the whole area was scrub like that still on the mount. These very large cleared areas sewn to crops give many parts of South Australia a low, smooth, and rolling appearance, little interrupted by trees. It is aesthetic that is very particular to that place.

Here, read this, it is important....

2007-11-07T17:37:00.000+11:00

This article is in the latest ALR, sort of Times review of books for us down here. This is a good article on trees and blow-ins. I have a few more of these, so watch out.

Mallee, again...

2007-11-06T15:35:00.000+11:00

On my way back from Port Lincoln, you can do it either by driving 700km around the top of Spencer's Gulf -named by Matthew Flinders after an ancestor of Princess Di, the 2nd Lord Spencer, who was Lord of the Admiralty in 1801,-to Adelaide which is only 250km east, or by taking the car ferry at Cowell, and cutting off 4-5 hours driving at the cost of about AUD140, I stopped for a constitutional near a silo. This is cropping country, like Yorke Peninsula, but the crops are not as good this year as those on Yorke Peninsula. This is mallee country, like most of South Australia's good cropping country. When I say good, it is not the European or American sense of heavy yielding. Here good means 1-2 tonnes an acre. This is the mallee, a small one, that is common in these parts.

Young fruit, red twigs, very similar to E. calycogona, but I don't think this one is that species. These trees were not flowering.

Old fruit, dark twigs.
Another specimen.
This is the other side of the road. These silos are the only places along this road where mobile telephone reception is any good. They also provide landmarks of towns, in an othersie very flat landscape.

Brachychiton 2...

2007-11-06T15:12:00.001+11:00

This my aunt's front yard in Port Lincoln, on South Australia's Eyre Peninsula. The tall tree on the right is Brachychiton acerifolius, Illawarra Flame tree. Unfortunately it is not flaming at the moment, although it is almost the early summer of its purported flowering. This tree is a relative of B. populneus, mentioned in an earlier post. The flowers are particularly startling, bright red flowers on bare branches.

Leaves under shade are large, lobed palmately, bright green and very shady. On the sunny side, the leaves suffer some damage from dry winds and too much sun.
The trunk of this tree, showing the bark. These are good, solid trees, quite unsuitable for timber because the trunk begins branching low down.
Old fruit, very like B. populneus, is encased in a similar leathery capsule. The fruit appears to ripen once the capsule has hit the ground. The seeds are small-hlf a cm- and pea like. Didn't taste them. Not likely too, but other animals might be keener. They call this type of fruit drupes, for obvious reasons. My aunt is very fond of this tree, and says she can see it in her garden from many streets away when it is in flower.

Brewer's ruins...

2007-11-06T12:51:00.000+11:00

This is the house my forefathers built sometime before the first war. It was only lived in for 30 years, and was my father's childhood home, and has since become the ruin it is now. I am not sure who built the place, the land was taken up by my great grandmother in 1912, although the family had been in the district since the early 1880s when they moved from Melrose, and my great grandfather died in 1899. It may have been built by and my grandfather and my great uncle Ted, who lived in another, similar house, about 400m south with my great grandmother. The house was built of limestone gathered from the square mile the family bought as their farm. The stones are cemented together with a weak mix of cement, sand and earth, a sort of marl. The floors were marl about 3/4th inch thick on levelled earth, and the roof was galvanised iron on 3x4s, with no ceiling apparent although hessian bags were often used in these vernacular houses. The house consisted of a kitchen with iron stove, a sitting room with painted marl walls, two bedrooms, and a small addition, a parlor, or third bedroom, beside the hallway. Behind this house was a series of lean-to sheds that were used for horses, farm machinery, tractors, and cars. Water was gathered in an in-ground stone tank lined with cement. The tank is still there although the lining has deteriorated to the extent it will no longer hold water. A much larger tank, 4m deep, of the same construction is about 200m away, near the road. This tank held about 50000 litres, or 10000 gallons. This is by way of a back story.

This is an ancient almond tree standing in the middle of a paddock of two row barley. Behind the tree is the wreckage of an old pine on the left, and the ruins of the house, and a mulberry tree of the same vintage.
Some years ago this area was burnt in a fire. The pines died, the almond survives, just. This was the only fruit I could see, a single nut within an arm's reach.
The branches are covered in bright yellow lichen. New branches have come through the lichen, complicating the tree's structure to the point it would be almost impossible to prune except severely.
This is the other dead pine. These trees are all of approximately the same age, some 80-90 years. In the background are mature examples of E. calycogona, mentioned in a previous post about Brewer's corner.
Closer to home is the mulberry, a mature tree probably as old as the other trees mentioned above. This one appears quite fruitful, as it is in bountiful flower. Immediately behind the tree is the in-ground tank that serviced the house, holding about 5000 gallons of water. The back door of the house would have been just to the right of the tree, where the stonework ends. (I think it was the back door, as the view above suggests the front of the house, but it faces away from the road. There is evidence of a front porch of some kind near the door.) The room on the right was the parlor, or third bedroom. My father had 2 sisters and a brother, and they also had plenty of family visitors, so there was a need for bedrooms.
The base of the mulberry. These seem to be slow growing trees. The oldest exotic tree in South Australia is a mulberry planted on Kangaroo Island in 1835-6, which was still productive in the 1950s and 60s when I was a kid, because in mulberry season we kids would sometimes spend an afternoon pigging out on fruit while our parents were in town. The tree was probably three the size of this one.
Mulberry flowers. The tree was covered in flowers, which points to a good season. They will, of course, be wasted by everyone except the birds and bees.
The lichen on the trunk of the tree. This is a quite thick and well developed covering of the older braches of the tree. it has been quite dry in recent years but the occasional rains would be enough to ensure the plant lives on.
Behind the barley is this mountain, Mount Misery, a terrifyingly jagged peak of unclimbable heights. The Mount formed the shared inner corner of the farm. I suspect the name was given either in jest or as a warning. My family went bankrupt on this land during the Great Depression, and moved away. But the names of families, places, the times, still inhabit me from my childhood when my father used to talk about his childhood. He was about 24 when they left the district, some 6 years after the farm was sold from under them by the State Bank of SA, now known by its fatuously modern business name of BankSA. The barley, this is the great barley growing area of Australia, is the best in Australia. If you want good beer, here is where you get the barley for the malt. This crop will go into many appreciative stomachs over the next year or so. Skoll.

Brewer's corner...

2007-10-18T14:51:00.000+10:00

At the corner of Gillis Road and the Petersville Road (-34 22 02 137 47 03E) is this sign. This is an intact stand of the original mallee tree - E. calycogona -which was common throughout the peninsula before European settlement in the 1870s. The corner is known as Brewer’s corner, and the reason I am here is that it is obviously part of my ancestor worship. My great grandfather on my father’s side settled here in the 1880s and my family remained until sometime in the early 1930s when the bank foreclosed and my family moved to Sherlock, on the mallee in the eastern part of South Australia. Quite a few acres of ground around here was cleared by my family, so the destruction of this tree’s habitat can be partly sheeted home to them. They continued on this destructive way at Sherlock, a railway hamlet built to maintain the train track to Melbourne, but the land is vegetated by mallee, remarkably similar to the mallee on Yorke Peninsula.

The flowers of E. calycogona seem to be attractive to the rather large ants that inhabit the region. These ants are at least 12mm long, and are found all over the blossoms on the tree. Without any references to guide me, I would say that this may be the reason the tree is protected now: ants instead of bees and birds are fertilizing the flowers.
The buds are quite distinctive, red and yellow in reddish stems. The new leaf seems to be red too, this may be a mallee characteristic. Ants also like buds, attacking them before the flower has opened.
Mature fruit seem to be covered with lerps. Ants must use these trees as fine dining, farms, and home away from home.
The base of the tree has a distinctive mallee formation, many branches close to the ground.
The trees are not that tall, only up to 3m, bushy, but very attractive on the roadside.
This ruin is my great grandfather and mother’s house. Built of the stone they picked from the paddock around them. Just up the road is the ruin of mr grandfather's house. They had a square mile of this country. The north west corner of which is a very low mountain, Mount Misery. Those who know me might find that amusing.

World's end here...

2007-10-18T14:43:00.001+10:00

The day I travelled here I went to World’s End, a gate on the way to a prosecution for trespass. I decided to go here, Point Inspiration, thinking the view from the top of the range would be worth it. However, when I arrived I found this. The tree that shelters this piece of hagiography is the ubiquitous E. Camaldulensis, red gum, but not the strong trunked river species but a pathetic, almost mallee, like version. What this is here for escapes immediate inspection. The plaster saints are behind a fence, in a plastic tank cut open so we can see them, but shelters the figures from the sun and rain.

The female is submissive:
The male is dominant. Maybe something to do with politics in the area.
The view from the point is sublime. Our plaster saints aren’t interested, they are concerned with their domesticity.

More Burra water, at the Gorge...

2007-10-18T14:41:00.001+10:00

Some miles south of Burra is the Gorge. This is an old and popular camping site in the eastern edge of the ranges.
Somewhere in the gorge is a permanent spring supplying water to the very large and deep holes along the creek. This is red gum country.

Further up the creek.
This is a branch off a very large red gum, E. camaldulensis, that appears to have taken root in the banks of the creek. This branch is about half a metre in diameter.
The branch comes off the main trunk of the tree, left, crosses over the footpath, branches into two, both parts of which seem to have taken root. The trunk is probably 2 metres in diameter but only about 10m above ground level.
The form of the tree is visible mainly because of the amount of mistletoe it carries. It is a very wide tree, but not that tall, perhaps 25-30m. The banks of teh creek are very steep at this point.

Further down the creek I saw this tree, perhaps 8m in diameter, but burnt so that its trunk has split in two forming two very old and stumpy trees. Several other Red gums in the vicinity were similar in form, which is not uncommon in old red gum. The trunk was probably been burnt through deliberate firing and misadventure, as it would now form a useful windbreak, and may have once been a slow combustion stove as the innards of the tree burnt.

Big Cornish holes...

2007-10-18T14:30:00.000+10:00

Here is more Cornish handiwork. This is a view of the Burra mine, also a copper mine, a deposit discovered in the early 1840s, like Kapunda. This hole was mined a lot longer, and a lot more copper was extracted. The holes is very deep, at least 50m under water level.

Here is a better view of the holes. Ain’t that special. The museum is the buildings at the rear of the lake.
I am not as interested in the mine as the reclamation at the edges. These pines...
I don’t know the species, and have no means at the moment of finding out. I will give some indicators, like cones, needles etc.
Sapling, new fruit, new needles.
Cones:
Big lot of trees man, all over the place. This is disturbed ground, these are weeds, unless they are deliberately planted, in that case they are weeds with a purpose.
For more on Burra try here.

The Burra...

2007-10-18T14:26:00.000+10:00

This is a row of miner’s cottages in Burra, about 150km north of Adelaide. The tree is a spotted gum of rather stout proportions, pollarded of course. Burra is an old copper town.

Another row of cottages, down by the river. This is one of two such rows in Paxton Square. The trees are quite common street trees in South Australia. They provide no shade and lots of little seed pods to litter the streets. The trunks are quite solid, so they may represent something about the bourgeois spirit with which the colony was founded in 1835.

Riders of the purple...

2007-10-18T14:16:00.000+10:00

Just outside the grape region of the Barossa is Kapunda, the first mining town in Australia. We haven’t exhausted our first in Australias yet and we are a short distance into our trip. Copper was discovered in 1840 here by local squatter, Mr Dutton on his ride back from somewhere. Now what has this to do with trees. Well you might ask, but it has a few trees around, and it is on the way to another copper mine, larger, which has a lot of trees. Trees were cut to feed the steam pump, line the stopes, and roof the miners’ houses. That’s my excuse. The chimney was built by the Cornish miners who worked the mine. The purple flower is Salvation Jane, or Patterson’s curse, depending where you are. It is now illegal for a local Council to remove these weeds from the roadside because they provide nectar of bees. Mr Dutton went on to own a station, now historical, called Anlaby, and one of his descendants was the writer poet, Geoffrey Dutton.

This hole was dug by hand. 14000 tons of ore was got from here, average grade 22%, a deposit which would cause paroxysms of joy in any mining company’s boardroom today. At first it was bagged and sent to Wales for smelting, but eventually it was smelted on site, using even more trees.
Here is a statue of the bugger that did the job. Must’ve taken a week given the size of him. I think there were several hundred employed as miners, others in ancillary trades. Mostly Cornish. Mining history in SA is Cornish during colonial times.

Herbig's tree...

2007-10-18T13:46:00.000+10:00

This tree is on the side of the road just outside Springton, in the eastern Barossa at about lat -34 42 46 long 139 05 32. The tree is just off the road, and is a rather startling object worth a stop. The family after whom it is named came from Gruenberg, Silesia in the kingdom of Prussia. My great great grandmother may have known this family. German Lutherans settled in this area from the 1840s, but the Herbig family lived here from 1855. This was their house.

This is a red gum, E. Camaldulensis, rather deformed now some of the top has come off and regrowth has taken place. But, look at the butt, 20m at least. Back view: more butt, but completely hollow inside, just the place to put the 9 kids. I think it was 9, it may have been more.
Signs: ancestor worship is big in SA. I am into it as far as I can get, pilgrimage after pilgrimage to every stone they ever touched, and some they didn’t.
Just across the road, in the car park is the well and horse trough. This may have been the bathroom too, but what is a hollow log to some is ensuite to others.

Out of place?...

2007-10-18T13:23:00.000+10:00

Several trees on the side of War Memorial Drive, in North Adelaide, attracted my attention because of the bright yellow flower buds which seemed to be prolific. These trees I have identified tentatively as E. stricklandii, Goldfields Yellow flowering Gum, or Sticklands Gum. These trees are among the usual inhabitants of city parks, the weeds, brought in to fill a perceived gap in local vegetation, drought hardiness, coming as it does from the Western Australian goldfields are around Coolgardie and Norseman.

The flower buds are bright yellow in the sun, about 2 to 2.5cm long, penile in shape, the caps are the same length as the base, although the caps are larger and brighter in colour. Seven seems to be their lucky number, the central bud is at right angles to the other six which are hexagonally spread around the peduncle. The peduncle is broad and flat, odd really. The flowers are yellow, although these trees haven’t flowered as yet. These flowers apparently are good nectar producers, which is probably why they have been imported from WA.
The old fruit is bell or urn shaped, with recessed valves under a nice cap. The valves split 4 ways when revealed. Mature fruit is quite large, these are about 3cm long and 1.5 in diameter. They cluster quite thickly on the branches, which means quite a lot of seed will be shed at release.
Leaves are longish, up to 150mm, sort of light green, although the young leaves are purple in the right light. Branches are a bright red-brown, especially where new growth is occurring. The older branches are dull, with a dark stem at the base of the tree. Not sure what to make of these trees, because they are in a public park, however, it is very dry at the moment and the trees seem to be doing quite well. It is an interesting question, whether we should maintain biological integrity by planting only locally indigenous plants, or whether we should mix and match according to our perceptions of the vagaries of the climate.

Gruenberg...

2007-10-16T17:09:00.000+10:00

This is the Lutheran Church at Gruenberg in the Barossa Valley in South Australia (-34 28 38 long 139 06 03). The church is of some significance to me because my ancestors helped build this church, worshipped here, and are buried in the graveyard. We are talking about my great great great grandfather and mother. My great great grandmother came from Guenberg in Silesia. My great great grandfather, however, is buried at Tiparra, a few miles from where I am writing this in Ardrossan on Yorke Peninsula. What I think is unusual about this church is its location. This is not the middle of a village or town, but a crossroads, dirt roads at that.

The church is still used, its grounds a beautifully maintained, and the place is surrounded by exotic trees. A row of cypress, some palms, and a few pines. The cemetery is in the native bush at the back. This is the front gate, rather ostentatious with its ironwork sign.
The rear of the church is well kept, pleasing in proportions, tidy in finish. It is rather liberal, very simple in design. The people who worshipped here, my ancestors too, were rather strict and humorless evangelical Lutherans, who fled their home country because Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia, wanted the evangelicals to join in the State sponsored church. They emigrated rather than lower their standards.
The old manse: the beauty of this building is in its simplicity.
Here is the inspiration for this post, the view from the road. Again the simplicity of the view is beautiful. The Barossa is the first great wine growing region in Australia, a practice introduced by the Lutherans in the early 1840s when they settled the Valley. Vast areas of the region are in the grip of the grape.
And here is Gottlieb’s original house. Now up for sale, it is 3br on 15 acres, 1 hour to town. Bargain if you have a lazy 250K. By the way, Gruenberg is now Zielona Gora, in western Poland, and coincidentally, the previous post was about a family who also came from there, who lived in a tree. Another odd coincidence is that when living in Sweden we were friends with a woman who came from Zielona Gora.

Kurrajong

2007-10-12T12:39:00.000+10:00

This is Brachychiton populneus - Kurrajong. This one is on or other side of the road from the E.stricklandii mentioned in the next blog. This is one of a small group of several Brachychiton species. These are small trees as yet, possibly they will grow to 10m. They have a dense crown of foliage, are quite shady to stand under, unlike the mallee and the gums on the other side of the road. These trees are in flower.

The male flower are bell shaped, quite large, up to 5cm, although the size varies. The flowers don’t seem to have any scent, but they are bright and cheerful. Why it is that nature endows the male flower and some animals with all colour and movement, yet human males are subject to the worst excesses of , is something of a worry, but we are not going to bother with it. We have decided to be happy, like a Kurrajong. The most immediate relative of this tree is the Illawarra Flame tree, B. Acerifolius.
Buds form small, light green pods.

Fruit is a large leathery pod full of three rows of tightly packed yellow seeds. These trees are often used as fodder trees, whether the pods or the leaves are used, I don’t know, and have no means of finding out. Some people are wary of these pods, the small hairs infesting the follicle are irritating on the skin, and the tree is sometimes called the “itchy tree”.
Stem of the trunk is solid, firmly situated, and even in a small tree quite large. This one is about 30-40cm in diameter, the tree is only 5m.

The neighbouring tree seems to be a small B. rupestre - Bottle tree. This tree should grow twice the height of its companion-up to 20m-and form the distinct bottle shape evident even here.

Camperdown botanical gardens

2007-09-28T19:09:00.000+10:00

This is the Camperdown Botanic gardens, one of many from the colonial era. Castlemaine was another visited in an earlier post. This garden is unusual in that it is on top of a dormant volcanic cone, Mt Leura. The soil is of course excellent for the purpose, and the garden is in an area noted for being damp. The tree above in a pine, whose name escapes me, but it is situated outside the fence, and pines not being a native species, the garden not being for many native species, one can only speculate what happened.

The particular pine is in flower, the flowers are quite large-the size of a tea cup, and stand up bright and cheerfully on a dull day.
Pine bark has such texture and sharp flakiness it is a pleassure to behold.
This is Mount Elephant, as viewed from the top of the mount. Its nameis suggestive of a resting elephant. the mount is about 40km away to the north, and is one of about 400 cones or various other volcanic features in Victoria.

This is a lake formed in a volcanic coned which appears to have slumped, Lake Bullen Merri. The area around Camperdown is very like a lake district, with some large lakes-Corangamite for instance-which are sometimes dangerous in changing weather.
My old favourite, the weeping elm, Ulmus glabra, Camperdownii, in its namesake. This one is quite young, but already is characteristically deformed.
The sign commemorating the planting of the tree by the Governor of the time.
Cabbage tree, Cordyline australis. These trees were once used as the material for making hats, cabbage tree hats, used in colonial times to give shelter from the sun to the fair English complexions of the squatting class.
The tree itself. Mt Elephant is barely visible in the background to the left of the pine. This garden is somewhat less well maintained and is a lot smaller than Castlemaine, but it has a sort of raffishness about it. The views are spectacular, the magpies are dicey. One spent a lot of energy eyeing me off, and swooped several times, just missing the statue of Robbie Burns to get at me. Seems to be that time of the year.

Kingston town

2007-09-28T19:08:00.001+10:00

Kingston town, the best fish and chips anywhere, the best you will eat. I guarantee it. That's not why Istopped there, but I don't regret doing. The fish had been caught that morning by the cook's father, in a boat by line. The thing had barely stopped twitching when it was cooked. The chips were from locally grown spuds, and they were cooked in fresh oil. The slad was local. So were the locals. They like things on poles in the bush, Kev's Kollecxtion is anything with an engine, tractors a speaciality, tanks, Centurion, are good too. Look elsewhere and you find a statue to another spcies which is a speciality of the area.
This thing is one of the original biggies, that now populate the Australia countryside. Why is ablog on trees, well I was just passing...
This monster was conceived and designed to be a model sitting on top of a car, to be used for advertising. Problem was someone either misread the measurements, a NASA moment, or didn't write them down right. So inches got to be yards, and it is now about 15m high. 2 metres is about the second joint on the front legs. They call it larry and it needs a lot of money to be restored. It broke when they moved it across the street. That would have been a sight for sore eyes.

hedge...

2007-09-28T18:56:00.001+10:00

This hedge is on the road near a spot called Orford. One comes around the corner and this suddenly appears, the absolute precision of the hedge cutting contrasts sharply with the roughness of the native scrubs and the cedars on the northern end of the hedge. Behind the hedge is a farm stead, and they have maintained this hedge for some time. I first saw this about 15 years ago when I was driving around doing field research for an MA.
The work maintaining this hedge must be considerable.
This is the point the cedars and the hedge meet. Chaos is just out the left hand side of the picture. The cedars are probably 100 years old, they are a tree of choice in this region, and plantings have been made for hedges, windbreaks, and self sewn voluntaries.

Grass trees...

2007-09-25T19:51:00.001+10:00

This is Xanthorea, sometimes known as the Grass tree: as kids we used to call them yaccas. They are very common in parts of Australia, for instance Kangaroo Island where I grew up, on Eyre pensinsula, the Grampians where this was taken. This is the western edge of the national park, in a degraded paddock. These plants grow very slowly, less than half an inch a year, so these maybe a hundred years old. They have been used to provide fodder for animals, and resin for the furniture trade. My father, in common with many bush bred men, spent some time in his early years collecting the gum, yacca gum, which was used as the foundations of shellac type varnishes.

The flowering spike grows quickly, and to 1-2m in length. It is a course fur with parrot beak like seed capsules. Fire was, in common with much of the Australian bush, a trigger for flowering.
Flowers are white star like, with some scent, but not particularly useful as nectar sources. The flowers are attractive, but ephemeral, lasting only a week or so. This spike is in the early stages of flowering, when the spike is in full flower it is a mass of these small flowers, and very noticeable in the bush.
The trunk has a concentric form, with a sponey mass inner, a hard shell and layers of closely interlocking elongated plates that are gummed together with a dark red resin, the yacca gum.
This photograph shows the trunk in cross section. The root ball consisted of a mass of protruding fibrous roots that held the trunk firmly in the ground.

The plates were trimmed off with a sharp axe to a few cms outside the hard shell, collected, and threshed in machines, usually home made, rather like a wheat threshing machines, and the gum collected. Being farm boys, the men who did this dirty task were adept at improvising, and most would have worked on large threshers in their youths, so building one out of timber and old iron would not have been beyond them.

mind the gap...

2007-09-25T16:46:00.000+10:00

Look at the picture above. There's something odd about it. Two trees, a gap, then rows of trees 20 or 30 metres back. This is Camperdown, a town in western Victoria. The local Shire Council is responsible for the gap. The citizens of Camperdown, under the sponsorship of the Finlay family, planted the trees in 1876. Every tree was planted by school children or their parents, every tree was apparently duly recorded with its planter and the records exist in the local historical society. There are 500 or more trees, elms, English elms. 500! How many cities or towns in North American or Europe would give a palace or two, and the burgemeister's left arm for 10% of those elms in the conition they are in. Envy is is not a fatal disease, but a local council is, especially for the trees.
This beautiful building in a normady romanesque style-my car is the grey station wagon parked outside-is the Shire Council building. The building with portico, not sure of the style, is the Shire information centre. I dropped in for a coffee the other day because I saw this sign:
I can't remember if I paid for the coffee but I had a couple hours of talking to the barista of friends of Camperdown's elms. These trees are about 130 years old, there are a couple of dead ones, there are a few gaps unfilled from trees which died, especially in the ends of the avenues, and there are several of these avenues and they are long. Finlay Avenue runs right through the centre of town.
Here is the plaque. Finlay's used to own Glenormiston, which is the original Neil Black homestead, now an agricultural college. Across Finlay avenue is another avenue, here is the northern half of it:
The council has decided to removed blocks of trees to replace the dead and dying, the sick and lame. Various arborists have been in town looking at the trees, and according to my informant, very few trees are rotten or dying. She said the arborist they used was an expert, an English expert, with experience with old trees and he claimed the trees had up to a hundred years left in them. He also said they could cut out the single trees which were diseased or rotten and replace them, and this had already been done in the avenues anyway. Council, what does the Council do?
This! Remove blocks of trees regardless of their condition and replace them with cloned elms, a metre inside the line of the older trees, and put in some nice furniture. They want to do the lot.
Here you get an idea of what it is like now. Imagine the rest of the trees, for at least a mile up the road you can see above, looking like the gap.
Here is the clock tower in the middle of town. That's the view when you turn around from this gap:
Little trees off line...ah for a Council with imagination. Then I drove a hundred yards to this one...

There were quite a few more of these gaps. Nothing it seems will change the Council's mind on this matter. They have established reference groups, got the Heritage people onside, but won't listen to external experts brought in by the citizenry to argue for a more selective approack to the great elm massacre, won't even listen to their own ratepayers, the people who live in the town, who grew up with the elms.
This lady is a representative of another country, of the empire that was when the town was established, to whose aid Camperdown's sons went in various wars. The dead are listed on the sides of the plinth, and there were many. They grew up with the elms, some may have even planted them, or their parents. She seems to be in quandary about the disturbance of her peace, as she is drawing the sword...
Whilst in the Botanic Gardens on Mt Leura, behind and above Camperdown, Robbie Burns muses, though not amused. This was a Scots town once, Finlay and Black at Glenormiston were both Scots. That's why Rabbie is there.

Anyone wanting to comment on the Corangamite Shire's decisions should look them up on the web-I am writing this in the Warrnambool caravan park-and send them a few words. I am sure encouragement to change their minds can come from everywhere there is a web connection.

Good luck Linda.

All that remains...

2007-09-15T09:46:00.001+10:00

This is the sawdust pile at a campsite in the Grampians called Smith's Mill. A Mr Smith had a sawmill here for many years, and accumulated a 3m high pile of the remnants of Grampians forest. Some of the sawdust burnt, there have been many fires through here, but very little grows on the remains of the trees.

The sign at Smith's Mill tells it all. There are a few remnants of millers cottages, many pine trees, and an obviously second or third growth forest around. The animals are friendly, or rather unconcerned, and I fed a currawong that was quite happy to sit on a post while I ate my breakfast.

Just a few km away, on the western side of the range is this new source of weeds, an olive grove. The Adelaide Hills are full of these mediterranean weeds, many Europeans have , in earlier times, satisfied their craving for olives and olive oil by picking the fruit. Now, along with the deer farms, we have olive groves. This one is on the side of a track on the way into another campsite.

This is a little out of the way of the Grampians, south, but still in the general area. It is a panorama of the Tower Hill park. This was once a source of much timber for the many farmers who lived in the area, potatoes are one of the earliest of the horticultural products of the area, but it was denuded for many years. In recent times there has been an attempt to reafforest Tower Hill, a vast slumped volcanic cone, with variable success.
I saw a koala busily eating itself out of house and home, having denuded all the food trees along the ridge where it resided. We watched while it ate the last few leaves off the tree in which it was roosted. Koalas were dumped into the park in the interests of nationalist notions of Australian landscapes, they are not native to the area. Weeds again.

The source of information of what Tower Hill looked like once upon a time is a famous painting by Eugene von Guerard from the 1850s-1860s. He spent some time in the Western Districts drumming up commissions, and sketching. There is an interesting case to be made out for his accuracy in depicting what he is painting, and there is also the problem of what is a picture and what is the reality. This picture was taken form an observation point which is claimed to be the one von Guerard used to make his sketches.

Deer hunter? Grampians...

2007-09-15T09:45:00.002+10:00

I was driving south from a site called Zumsteins in the Grampians national Park, when two of these ran across the road in front of me. I stopped and the third ran behind the car. These are fat and feral deer,escapees from some deer farms which border the park. These are some of the more unusual weeds that infest our countryside. I thought for a moment I was in Sweden, and thankfully no one has yet to farm moose in this country.

They are so fat, the place is so barren: that being the result of the 2006 fires which burnt about 150000ha or about 45% of the park. Burnt is right, as you can see the trees are barely beginning to recover, the ground is a layer of ash, and many of the shrubs and grasses are gone.

Rabbits, foxes, feral cats and dogs, fish and weeds of every sort flourish in the park. Some are deliberately released, and not enough hunting is done to control them. Bring on open season, get the King of Sweden out for a bit of sport.

Grampians 1...

2007-09-15T09:45:00.001+10:00

Fire went through these forests in 2006. 150000 ha were burnt in a day or so. The fire was very hot, and the trees are only just recovering. This is down the road from the top of Mt William, the highest peak in the grampians, about 1200m. The day was overcast, rainy, cool. But the colour temp of the light helps appreciate the amazing capacity of the eucalypt to recover froma disaster.

Further up the road to the top, this view is over the valley, most of which was burnt.

This is on the east side of the range. The fire seems to have burnt upwards towards the top of the range, from both sides. As one got further up, and as the cloud came down, it was hard to work out whether the trees had been burnt or not. But I went off the track for a few yards, not far from the top, and my bright blue rain coat was soon streaked with black charcoal. The fire seemed to stop a few yards from the top, perhaps because it is cool and often very damp up there.
Here is the cairn at the top of the hill. I won't spoil the view by showing the signal towers a few metres away. Ugly things, they enabled me to talk via mobile phone to my wife quite easily. A few metres past the cairn is a drop of 200-300m. The clouds came down while I was there and visiblity was only a few metres, but when they lifted, one could see for miles.
Away to the north east, after the clouds had lifted. More burnt scrub, some unburnt.

big red...

2007-09-15T09:44:00.001+10:00

This is E. camaldulensis, red gum, the big tree of the western plains of Victoria. This tree is on the roadside south of Ararat, a few miles south of the turnoff to Barton, Richard Hanmer Bunbury's run from the squatting era. The bushfires of 2006-7 have been through this area and the trees have taken a singeing. The tree pictured is quite large as are many trees along the road verges in this area. I stepped out 12 metre circumference half a metre out fromthe base of the trunk, my maths suggests a trunk of about 3 metres diameter, which is a fairly substantial tree. It is hard to estimate tree height without a theodolite or an alidade, but I would hazard a guess at 40-45 metres.

Down the road half a mile from the tree above is this log of an old red gum fallen. Again perspective belies the size of the trunk. The diameter at the left hand side, a metre in from the break is about 2 metres, being my guess from standing on the embankment next to it. This, like the previous tree, is an old gum, probably several hundred years old, and predating the European settlement of the area in the 1830s, and probably predating Captain Cook's voyage down the east coast of New Holland in 1770 by several centuries.
The uprooted end of the tree, showing the trunk as partly burnt out.

This is a branch of the tree a metre across on the longest axis. This branch was hidden in the fork of the tree in the picture two above. This wood is intensely red when polished, although it is a timber with many flaws. It was much used for fencing and railways sleepers because is it is resistant to many insects, to water rot, and is hard and stable and very long lasting. Even now it is possible to buy timber which has been sawn from trees felled a hundred years ago and left in the paddocks and only sold because there is a demand for such a beautiful timber.

more 4X...

2007-09-15T08:56:00.001+10:00

Linking the prior post to this is a weeping willow, just springing back into life after a cool and short winter. The roses are well pruned, the ducks have their young, the lawns are mown.
On the way into town an nice avenue of London plane trees, pollarded in the domestic brutalistic style. The blue car was one of many around town that Sunday for an antique car conventionof some sort, although many of the cars looked a lot like I would imagine a hot rod to be.

This was early, hence the colour of the light. But the prunus are well into flower all over the countryside.

A short bit of Castlemaine street in the harsh light of morning. The streetscape retains some of its originality.

This is the market building, 1862 I think. One of the oldest and most intact in the country. The style is a mix, but here is a good description, although I have seen better in a locally produced book about the goldfields architecture. It is also a great site to explore the gold history of this country. The building next door was a school until it was converted into a supermarket, and the old market area where, according to the locals I talked to, the stockyards were situated is now the car cattleyard feeding the maw of the supermarket. At least the signage isn't outrageous.
This the the Burke monument on a hill overlooking the town. The connection to the town is through the fact Robert O'hara Burke was a mounted police inspector in the district, he may also have camped here on his way to glory, but the monument was erected very soon after the consequences of the exploration were known. The monument should have been erected to the stupidity of both the committee that chose Burke to lead the exploration and Burke's, and it doesn't capture to bathos, pathos, and the other musketeers of the adventure of two fools in the outback. The simple lines of the monument and simple lettering in gold give more dignity to the disaster than it deserves. The other connection to this site is the DIG tree on Cooper's creek. Here is a blog with a list of similar memorials. Robin Annear has been around here.

XXXX...

2007-09-14T20:51:00.001+10:00

This sign at the entrance to the Castlemaine Botanical Gardens gives an indication of the effects of the goldrushes of the 1850s on the colonial local town culture. Many of the major goldrush towns now have botanical gardens, and there was a supportive network of designers and suppliers centred on the Melbourne Botanical Gardens and the charismatic and energetic Ferdinand von Mueller. Von Mueller was the most important of colonial scientists, he had done extensive collecting and classifying of the local flora, he was in contact with his peers overseas through his prolific letter writing, and he was unstinting in his support of local botanisers. I visited the garden, which was next to the camping ground, about 7am one Sunday morning recently. It was 2C, and the sun was just rising.
In the centre of the gardens is this sign and, fleetingly, the shadow of my head. The picture is of three trees which are still growing in the garden: a Deodar cedar Cedrus deodara, Red Gum Eucalyptus camaldulensis, and Spotted Gum Corymbia maculata.
The tree closes to the camera is the Red gum, that to the right is the Spotted gum. The Red gum now has a bole of about 4 feet diameter, which is a small tree compared to some in Victoria.
This is the Deodar cedar with the red gum in the background immediately to the right. This tree is now more than 150 years old and is a faster growing tree than the Red gum which was mature when the gardens were first constructed. The trees are roughly the same height, about, guessing, 30 metres.
The entrance to the gardens from inside, just down the avenue of various elms, including examples of the nototious Dutch elm. This is another elm- my favourite-the Weeping elm. Several examples appear on this blog, but these are the only ones so far in a botanical garden.
Sitting in an elm tree, English elm by the size of it, a flock of cockatoos, another of my favourite eblems of the forest. These birds can be very destructive, they like the newly budding tips of trees, pine cones just before maturity and anything easily and messily torn up. They are also very gregarious and noisy. The 4X in the title refers to a famous Australian beer XXXX which is now produced in Queensland, but which was first produced in Castlemaine. The Castlemaine goldfields where part of an extensive line of goldfields which stretched 150 miles across central Victoria. For more info try here.

on the road to...

2007-09-14T20:19:00.000+10:00

This is another war memorial, on the road to a little village called Moyston, which shelters under the eastern side of the Grampians. The memorial avenue is in very good, well maintained condition considering it is now about 80 years old. This is one of the copper name tags on the posts which front each tree.

The concrete posts in front of the trees, the trees were probably planted as saplings when the memorial was created.

The entrance to the memorial avenue from the north. The sign on the right concerns the avenue, that on the left is tempting, but ultimately unsatisfying. The home of Australian Rules Football is only announced on this sign, there seemed to be no evidence in the village that there was a museum to the code's origins, or to the code itself.

The commendation of Cpl Matthews for his Military Medal (MM) is taken from the Australian War memorial records:

He returned from the first war, I have no idea what happened to him afterwards.

Occasionally 2...

2007-08-07T20:22:00.000+10:00

Now this is an odd thing, one could wonder about. It is odd partly because it is a picture taken at 200x through my daughters' extremely plastic Digital Blue microscope. It is a closeup of a flower bud of an acacia, name unknown as yet, at the season when the buds are developing quite quickly. I collected it from a tree in the long and rambling GlenBurnie Road, Mitcham.
Here are the buds at 60x.
A flower stalk at 10x. Each cluster has about seven buds.
Another acacia species, as yet unidentified, the flower stalk of which is a series of rotating alternating buds on a stem. This is 60x.
Leaves and flower stalk at 10x. The alternation and rotation is evident here.
Stem and leaves. The greyish bud is I suspect the haven for an insect which infects the acacia. This tree had many such, a lot had turned burnt brown and decayed. when the insect had left.
Pods at 60x. They look like a fruit, but aren't. Acacia produce a seed pod similar in appearance to garden peas.
Here are the old pods, hanging like old decaying apricots.
The trunk system of the tree is very branched from just above ground level, not an uncommon system in Australia.
Another acacia, probably Acacia baileyiana, Cootamundra wattle, a flower, and part of a leaf, at 10x.
60x, the leaf becomes quite plastic, though rather gritty around where the leaf joins the stalk.
Flower at about 60x, is just a mass of yellow. The microscope is not good enought to focus clearly at that magnification and on such a mass.

GlenBurnie Road, Mitcham showing some of the acacia in flower. GlenBurnie Road was a private street, quite an uncommon concept in Australian cities, hence the lack of footpaths, kerbing, and the winding paving.

Grass trees...

2007-08-03T12:00:00.001+10:00

This is Xanthorrhoea, we used to call them yaccas when I was a kid, which is a long time ago now. Probably yacca was a corruption of yucca, the american plant which bears a minor superficial resemblance. These are in the western part of the Grampians National park, halfway to the SA border, 4 hours from Melbourne at a late hours drive.
They grow exceedingly slowly, 50 years ago I was told half an inch a year. I have accepted that as a fact, though I have no idea how true it is. They seem to flower occasionally too, especially after a good fire.
The flower stem grows quite long, this one is over a metre and they grow up to two metres, with a hard pile to the surface, small beak like seed capsules will be produced from the flowers. The flowers are white or cream, like a fine star. They are full of nectar, though not that scented.
The yacca is a source of gum. The trunk, which can grow several metres, consists of overlapping whorls of leaf like structures cemented together with a gum which is harvested for furniture making. My father did some of it when I was a kid, it was at the time a source of a small additional income to the pittance he was earning. The gum was cut off the trunk with an axe, seived though a rough iron seive and the resulting gum bagged.

This picture shows a section of the trunk of the Xanthorrhoea. The core seems soft but the gum on the inside of the leaflets is very strong and forms a hard case for the centre which seems to be the means by which the foliage is fed. The root ball is not particularly large although it is made up of many strong filaments. The leaflets were cut with an axe and the gum residue shaken out for resin.

mates...

2007-08-02T22:20:00.001+10:00

These are my mates, often seen about the district. Of all creatures these birds seem to have the most fun. This is the same flock of cockatoos I have posted about before.

They are intelligent, sociable creatures. I have a short piece of video taken on my Pentax OptioWP which features the above birds. The centre bird has some object in its foot and is holding it up to eat it. The other two birds come in for a look, and the right hand bird takes it off the centre bird and scurries away The centre bird then turns to the left bird and complains. I haven't worked out how to add video to the blog, but you can probably access the Quicktime here.

tree eating...

2007-08-02T20:00:00.000+10:00

This tree is in Phillips Street, just around the corner from my house.. The tree is in the front of a corner house and is very large, perhaps 30 metres with a 1 metre bole. Like all gums it likes to branch, however the power lines run along the street so the great Aussie tree pollarding takes the form of a bite out of the west side of the tree. In ten years or so the tree will be tall enough that the lower branches will be over the power lines. I will keep you informed.

Itchy tree...

2007-08-02T19:40:00.000+10:00

I think this is a specimen of Callistemon sieberi. It is a street tree near the Morack golf course, one of my favourite haunts-not that I play the silly game-however I walk down this street quite often as one of my daily walks. I noticed the seed fruit stuck to the branches. It is an odd tree that should preserve its fruit even as the twigs that bear them grow into branches, and the shrub into a tree.

These fuit don't seem to have given up their seeds. The branches are three inches in diameter now so they have been many years attached to the limb. This may have some advantage to the plant in that it retains its seed until the optimal time to release it. Aroad side verge covered in couch grass may not confer such a moment. It may be fire is necessary, Callistemon are related to banksia which often do require a hot fire to open the fruit and release the seed into a bed of ash.
This shows the fuiting bodies a couple of years after flowering. The fruit is tightly collected in spirals around the limb.
This year, bottom, and last year, top, fruiting bodies. The limbs on which these flowers set are very thin,perhaps about 3-5mm, and alwys at the end of a limb.

The growing point of a limb. This encloses a tightly balled bunch of leaves.

Occasionally...

2007-08-02T17:37:00.000+10:00

This is an acacia- probably Acacia baileyiana- near my daughters' school. I have been watching it for several months as the buds develop-that may be another post-and for the weather to warm enough for the buds to burst. They finally made it the other day.
The tree is quite large, and forms a strong focus at the end of the street, and provides good shade in summer to the few cars that can park under it. Late July seems to be acacia flowering time, there are many splodges of yellow in the area, and in the parks. However, I think the flowering time depends on other factors, as wattles flower earlier the further north one goes. When it is sunny the trees are full of bees collecting pollen.
The flowers hang in bunches. I have no idea, although I wish otherwise, whether the flowering time this year is earlier than usual. We have had a very dry year up to May, since then it has been quite wet and cold, except for the last few days when it has got warm again. The flowering was bought on by the warmer weather.
Closeup. A few of the flower heads in the picture above have yet to burst. Each head is a ball of slightly more than a centimetre in diameter.

The yellow is intense. It reminds me of Sweden, where the early spring first blossoms were always yellow.

dreamtime?...

2007-06-11T17:29:00.000+10:00

On another of my recent walks, I've had a bit of a lay off recently, I saw this. About two weeks before I had been along the same route while some workmen were busy trimming the pines at this corner because the surveyors were pegging a road widening. The corner is the nearest on Burwood Highway to Eastlink, the tollway that runs north from Frankston to Ringwood along the Scoresby valley.

This is another example I saw on another highway, Maroondah, just outside of Ringwood. We often see these memorials along the country roads, over the last 20 years or so they have become increasingly common, and there are places along the Hume Highway and the Goulburn valley Highway, where multiple memorials commemorate black spots on the roads. I didn't get close enough to see the details, I couldn't quite bring myself to cross from the public to the private space that seems to surround these trees; which is odd as I like cemetaries. Perhaps a cemetary is a public space only, and doesn't mark the site of the death like these memorials. These memorials bear some relation to the cauarinae mentioned in an earlier post, casually 3 on 22nd April, which recalled some of the Aboriginal myths of the creation of the Murray-Darling river system by Ngurunderi, in one story of which Ngurunderi used a casuarina to enter the heavens. perhaps these trees are some deep longing for that same connectedness. Perhaps the tree is just an opportune means of displaying the memorial.

There has been a bit of sociological work, and historical, on memorials. This transcript on ABC Radio National is interesting. We have a long history of war memorialising, which is a classical thing. I have seen a World War One war memorial lying on the ground in a Polish village in what used to be Brandenburg Prussia. I have a photograph somewhere in a box of a grave site beside a road in the Western Districts, I think it says 'killed by blacks'. It matters that we memorialise all the deaths and murders of colonial settlement, it would complete this process, then I would believe some of what was said in the transcript. We could free the trees of this burden.

don't you weep for me...

2007-06-11T13:09:00.000+10:00

I reported on a weeping elm in Campbell's croft some time ago. I was on a walk the other day which took me through the area again. As the tree loses its leaves the structure becomes visible. It occurred to me that our eucalypts bear some relation to a deciduating tree, in that their branch and trunk are always exposed, and leaves are confined to the outer limbs, just as a deciduous tree loses its leaves until a few remain at the very extremities. Just a thought.

pincushions...

2007-06-11T12:33:00.001+10:00

This is a specimen of Hakea laurina, Pincushion hakea, which is growing in the golf course off Morack Road, South Vermont, (lat. -37 51.33 long. 145 11.97 E). This specimen is quite a long way from its home range, the southwestern coastal areas of Western Australia. It is called Pincushion hakea for the obvious reasons of the structure of the flower.

it is early winter here in Victoria, so the tree is flowering, a sort of sporadic effusion. However, as one can see in the above picture, the structure of the flower also indicates the way the tree fruits: fruit are in large and prominent clusters, and thickly clumped over the limbs of the tree., each fruit the product of the fertilization of a style.
Leaves here appear to be somewhat effected by a spotty disease, which may be a function of the location, this is not sunny coastal slopes. This tree is a few metres from a previous post-17th May And along came Jones- in an area in which there are probably no native species.
Out on a limb of the tree, one gets a clear idea of the way the tree bears its fruit. Morack Road is in the background.

The gold course is in the background here. It is no greener than it was during the last, very dry, summer, but the grass is now very green among the trees, unlike last summer. The golf course collects runoff and stores it further down near Dandenong Creek.

It isn't a large tree as yet, more a sapling which will grow to about 8m, according to the book. I found this tree interesting in its profiligacy, which seems to me to be unusual in a tree sourced out of the coastal regions.

Har den åran! Carl von Linnés 300-årsdag.

2007-05-23T20:59:00.000+10:00

You've seen him before, but today is his special day, his 300th birthday. Happy birthday Carl, or Linnaeus, as we sort of know him. I did a piece on this wooden statue of the man in a very early post in January this year. The statue is in Djurgarden in Stockholm, where it is now approaching summer. I took the photograph in 2004, while I was living there.
Linnaeus taught at Uppsala University, a wonderful town not very far from Stockholm. Among those he taught was Daniel Solander, inventor of the specimen box, acolyte, friend of Sir Joseph Banks, James Cook, and who was here 70 years before my ancestors arrived in 1839-40.

Linneas invented modern taxonomy, the binomial system of Latin genus/species we use and have modified. Chelsea Flower show has a tribute. And there is a lot of energy going into this tercentennary, for some of Sweden's try this! Happy birthday Carl.

and along came Jones...

2007-05-17T21:45:00.000+10:00

I was out walking the other day along Morack Road, which forms one boundary of the golf course, and I heard a couple of my friends from the other day (see Cockatoo 10th May).
A little later a saw a couple of them down by the road side, grazing...
As I stood watching, other cockatoos came to see what was interesting. They stayed...
The road , which is quite busy, was about 1 metre from our friend watching me. The birds were completely unfazed by passing cars...
Another birds flies in. They are quite big, at least 18 inches from head to tailfeathers.
In all about 10 arrived...
I walked away, I was on my morning walk, and had already spent half an hour watching these beautiful birds. But then...
Along came an old man, a real coky, walking just off the road, oblivious to everything...
He walked straight through the flock. They took off and headed into the treetops, he just kept walking... The tree with the reddish tinge is flowering. I am sure I know what species it is.

Getting a lift...

2007-05-10T16:17:00.000+10:00

This palm tree was brought in to decorate the front yard of a St Kilda house. The front yard was created by removing quite a large two storey building used as flats. In St Kilda this is quite a common thing, the beachfront is lined with palms so imported. The trees are planted and considerable attention is paid to watering, as the soil is quite sandy. Park Street probably was at the back of the sandhills which once lined this part of the bay, so the gound was also swampy. However, that was a hundred years ago. Accompanying the palm was a fig, which can be seen on the right hand side just under the palm fronds. It will be interesting to see what happens: figs grow far quicker and larger than palms.

Cockatoo...

2007-05-10T16:08:00.000+10:00

These white cockatoos spend considerable time on the ground feeding. They often roost in a large gum in someone's backyard just down the street from where I live. 'Cockie' is an Australian slang term for farmer, especially one on poor ground. Here is slang in action! The ground is the Vermont Primary School grounds, and the cockies were completely oblivious to the noisy morning run of innumerable school children just metres away. The trees in the grounds include oaks, various gums, but I think this is an old fruit tree-I haven't looked closely-as this area was once orchards and farms, highly productive ones at that.

casually 4...

2007-05-09T17:16:00.000+10:00

This is a fruit of a casuarina species which I know not. I used small digital camera for the closeup. It shows the vavles opening, exposing the winged seeds. When the valves open it appears to move the seed outwards, exposing the wing membrane to the winds. This fruit is quite large, about 2.5cm.

Same seed, different coloured background, so we can see the wing membrane better?

Seeds against a millimetre rule. Had a little fiddle in Photoshop etc., as I took the snap without flash, under house light.

'Tis the season to be...

2007-05-09T17:08:00.000+10:00

We city slickers find this season somewhat contrary. We have enormous plantings of deciduous trees in our urban woodlands. So in our autumn their leaves turn, while the native trees are often flowering. The contrast will later become stronger, as some trees will be leafless, the rest will be putting on new growth, full of noisy lorikeets after nectar, and dripping raindrops. The large tree in the background is a haven for a local flock of white cockatoos.
This tree is on the street parallel and immediately north of where I live.
Here, on another street, on the way to my children's school is another sign of the season.

Nearby, is this beautiful sapling.
In Melbourne it isn't cold enough to snow, although the occasional flake may hit the ground, and light is the factor controlling seasonality. We don't have the great differences of day length found further north or south-Stockholm's day length varies between 5.5 hours and 18.5 hours, which means about 5 minutes a day. Here it is a few hours, but it is nice to see the burning bush.

significant trees 1

2007-04-25T18:05:00.001+10:00

Here is something interesting. I must follow up. With considerable thanks to White Hat, you can link to the Australian garden at Cranbourne, which will give visitors to this site a n interesting insight into good Australian native gardening practice, unlike the grwoing green stuff on the last post.

growing green....

2007-04-25T17:58:00.000+10:00

Try this, a completely unintelligible bit of gumtree narcissism. And notice the example of nominative determinism: CR. Kate Redwood.

casually 3

2007-04-22T13:57:00.001+10:00

These are Casuarinae, Bulloak and Sheoak. By way of digression here is a Dreamtime story of the creation of the Murray River, part of the main river system in eastern Australia: Ngurunderi is the all powerful ancestor of the Coorong people, it was his journey to the Coorong that created the Murray River and its surrounds. Ngurunderi was chasing a large Murray Cod (ponde), throwing his spear at it many times, each time the Cod escaped, rushing forward and thus creating the river. In its attempts to escape the fish turned to and from, creating the numerous bends we now see in the river. At last the giant fish arrived at Lake Alexandrina, where it floundered about in the shallows.

Ngurunderi and his family soon arrived to find the old warrior named Nepele was there before them. Joining forces they killed the giant fish. The place where they killed it is now a sandbank in the lake. Ngurunderi then cut the fish into small pieces throwing each piece into the water. The pieces came to life and swam away, some as codfish, some as catfish, mullet etc. Finally there remained only the bones, which Ngurunderi cut up and through into the water, these turned into the bony bream, still frustrating to any person that tries to eat it.

There are other versions of this story, including this fantastic site.

There is another version of this story, I read many years ago, in which Ngurunderi started at the head of the Darling River, and traversed the whole of the Murray-Darling, crossed Encounter Bay, forming the Sisters islets to Kangaroo Island and entered the Milky Way via a giant Casuarina near Penneshaw. Kangaroo Island was my home for my childhood and much of my youth, so I like the specificity of this version, because of my memories of the trees and the silky sound the wind made in them.
Casuarinae are native to Australia, and we have, in our odd way, given them common names which bear no relation to the original holders of the name, She oaks and Bull oaks. The species are now two, Allocasuarina and Casuarina. More on that later. Above are pictured three species, the bushy green tree second from the left, a brownish tree 4th, and a darker tree 5th.
These trees are 4th and 5th from he left above, they on a small island between Canterbury Road and a slipway park at the intersection of Mitcham and Canterbury Roads, Mitcham.
This tree is the 5th above, a smoky purple-black. Don't know what species as yet.

This tree is 4th, brown, I think it is Allocasuarina littoralis, Black Sheoak. These casuarinae are on a small island of land between a busy road-Canterbury Road- and a slip way parking area. They are interesting because the fartherest tree is a deep grey-purple in colour, and the other is brown, very like the tree in an earlier post casually.
This one is across the road, and is almost golden in colour. The colour comes from the male flowers, pollen producing anthers at the end of the branchlets, needle shaped, segmented, which function as leaves. This is Allocasuarina littoralis, Black Sheoak.
The anthers hang in bunches.
The anthers at 10x. They have multitudes of tiny flower like petals along each anther.
This is a branchlet segment join at 10x. Notice the pale, tiny teeth like triangular things. These are leaves, and by counting these, and the number of longitudinal ribs, one can determine the species. Bugger that.
A bunch of nuts, fruit of the dark tree pictured above.
The branchlets and female flowers of the 4th tree.
Thes are Allocasuarina littoralis fruit, small (1cm) and plentiful.
Using a macro....

Or digital microscope, at 10x mag.
Female flowers and branchlets, at 10x. The seeds of allocasuarina littoralis at 10x. Notice the wings.
At 60x. 150000+ viable seeds per kilogram, and the potential to produce suckers, these plants are designed to survive in the hardest environments this country can produce. And they will fix nitrogen.

However, like all things, they can escape their native environment and, in a more salubrious environment, become weeds.

casually 2 ...

2007-04-16T21:51:00.000+10:00

This is a small Casuarina in Dickens Street, Blackburn. The brownish male flowers are barely visible here, but the tree provides several branches low enough to phtogaph the females.

The female flowers are not at the tip of the needles, but along the stem of the branch. They look like little brown brushes, about a half to an inch long, alternating around the stem.
This photo gives an idea of what becomes what. The seed pod is about an inch and half long. The females are rather lost among the needles of the casuarina, which is unlike most flowers, nor do they seem to attract insects of birds. Their neighbouring gums which are in flower are full of honey eaters like parrots, lorrkeets, wattle birds etc.

a lone post, lest we forget.

2007-04-14T20:39:00.000+10:00

This is the Lone Pine (Pinus halapensis ssp brutia), or Aleppo Pine, in Wattle Park, Burwood, Victoria (lat -37 50.44 long 145 06.22E). The tree was grown from seed brought back to Australia from the Gallipoli Peninsula by a veteran of that campaign during WW1. I thought I would post this because we are getting to the silly season when a lot of politicians begin to cloak themselves in the patriotism of scoundrels, including one of the local members who sent out his newsletter complete with pictures of various serving soldiers and nurses. Question: who was the last Australian Prime Minister to serve in this country's services?

Answer, which may surprise most Australians, Gough Whitlam. Before him as Prime Ministers who saw some service were McMahon, Gorton, Holt, McEwen, Earl Page, and Bruce. The great Ming was a white feather coward, and Mr Howard, our present leader, is a great encourager of military service but has had none himself. However, he will line up to take centre stage at Gallipoli again this ANZAC Day.
There was some doubt as to who brought the seeds back, but an article in our local paper, The Whitehorse Leader, claims to have solved the mystery. Here is the official version of the story.
This plaque is wrong, according to the paper, in attribution of the remembrance, but that, I think, is a minor flaw.
The seeds were brought back to Australia by Pte Thomas Keith McDowell from the 23rd Battalion, not Sgt. Keith McDowell of the 24th Battalion. The 23rd alternated with 24th in serving at the front at Lone Pine. The tree was planted on Sunday May 7th 1933. Around the base of the tree, in 1976, were scattered the ashes of Sir Frank Selleck, who served in the 24th. The neighbouring plaque celebrates the man. The clock tower on the stone obelisk celebrates another soldier who died in the war: "In proud remembrance of Royden Louis Charles Bennett, 7th Battalion AIF killed in action at Pozières, France, 18 August 1916. Donated by his mother, Mrs Zilpah Bennett in 1948. Dedicated 7 May 1995"
This tree, like the Calder Woodruff Memorial Avenue described in an earlier post, add some melancholy to the places where they grow. This one overlooks a battered football oval, yet its near neighbours include a gum, and an oak and an elm. Stuff on the 23rd and 24th Battalions can be found here. Another take on the matter can be found here. This gives a rather humane touch to the business.

Don't give a fig...

2007-04-13T14:20:00.000+10:00

How green is this? While recently walking across this park, Fitzroy Gardens (lat -37 48.89 long 144 58.89E), towards the east end of Collins Street I almost got bogged in the green grass. This is very unusual given the state of the rains. I met a park ranger, and was about to ask about a tree when he said he was looking for a leaking water main. I showed him where it was, the green bit above, and continued on my way, lest I be late.

The neighbouring gardens, Treasury gardens, so named because they front up to the Treasury buildings along Treasury Place, contain a variety of trees, both exotic and sort of local. Among the trees is two rows of Moreton Bay figs Ficus macrophylla, which shelter a south-east pathway through the gardens. These gardens are a favourite place for workers in adjacent areas to sit and eat their lunch, snog, and meet their families.
The pathway isn't very wide, the trees are big and more upright than the usual Moreton Bay fig, probably because of proximity,and the ground around the trunk has been well mulched to conserve what moisture is in the soil. The figs are surface feeders so the root systems are well protected here with mulch and a film of dropped fruit, which is unpleasant to find attached to boots and clothes.
Typical trunk with exposed roots, forming series of buttresses around the base of the trunk. These trees aren't particularly old, so the trunks and buttresses are quite small. This would be about a metre in diameter. These trees have yet to drop their aerial roots.
The fig. These small, globular fruit (about 2-3cm in diameter) are edible, but you won't catch too many of us eating them. They are sweet, with a gritty texture and a jammy taste. The grittiness comes from the fact that, like all figs, the fruit is a lot of flowers growing on the inverted flesh of the fruit. It is apparently fertilized by a tiny symbiotic wasp (Pleistodontes froggatti. This wasp has recently migrated to NZ, and is now found in the fruit of naturalised Moreton Bay figs.
I quite like the fruit, but have never tried more than a few at a time. Figs I like, and I had a fig tree in a previous house which I looked after, competed assiduously with the birds and fruit bats for the fruit, and ate every fig I picked-no one else in the house liked them, so I had the lot. Perhaps one should try some Moreton Bay fig jam. For more try here and here for a nice American picture.
However, you will not find, so far as I have searched, a recipe for jam on the bush tucker sites. Pity.

casually...

2007-04-13T13:49:00.000+10:00

The little park just around the corner is called Bellbird Dell. There are bellbirds (or more correctly bell miner, Manorina melanophrys, in the Dell, but they are very hard to see. You hear them as you walk through, and from surrounding houses, but unless you are lucky they remain very much out of sight. There are other, better places to see bellbirds. The small copse of casuarinas above is in the Dell at lat -37 50.61 long 145 11.6E. The trees are at least two species, which have some features in common...

Bark. Notice the thick bed of dead needles around the base of the trunk. Very little of anything will grow through this carpet, giving the trees a competitive advantage of the sort common with many Australian species, including some eucalypts.

The many seed containers, under the tiny valves, open after the fruit dries on the ground, and the seed spills. The regeneration rate is not that high in parks like this. In wilder parks you see a lot more shoots.
The male flowers (brown) give quite a distinctive colour to the tree. The females are not visible on these snaps, and I will get some for adding.
I will add some interesting variations of these trees, there are some purple and other colours nearby, which I noticed the other day.

Upside down...

2007-04-09T13:21:00.000+10:00

Inside the National Gallery of Victoria-how Canberra hates the 'National Gallery bit-(lat -37 49.45 long 145 58.09E). The Gallery has a very large pile of white Lego, and has invited its patrons to make a cityscape. My wife and daughter are centre, and the cityscape is silhouetted against the greenery beyond, which is the London Plane trees (Planatus acerifolia) lining St. Kilda Road. The Plane trees are now beginning their deciduous phase.

Outside it looks like this...
The Gallery is a very large bluestone block, fronted by two long shallow pools which also form part of the cooling system, cooling both the building and visitors. People also use the pools for tossing their money away, and occasionally for impromptu swimming.
Where you don't swim is here, in the Yarra, where once, in colonial times, was a watering place from which Melbourne drew its drinking water. This river isn't toxic, just polluted, mainly with dog doo, the runoff from illegal sewer connections and illegal dumping of industrial wastes. The banks are now lined with watering places, using mainly imported water coloured with hops or barley, juniper berries etc. The caffes are pretty good, and the coffee isn't too bad either.
On the other side of the river are more trees, above which pokes the polychromatic tower of the Flinders Street railway station. It was a warm day, we went to hear the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, ate food, wandered about, then went home.

look again...

2007-04-09T13:10:00.000+10:00

E. newbeyii, Newbey's mallee, recently. See an early post (Heading south...)

Flowers have gone, some are yet to be. The pale green valves of the fruit, and the long green opercula are quite distinctive.

dinner plain...

2007-04-09T11:49:00.000+10:00

Just up from the oak, and still in the same park is this small sapling, probably E. tricarpa, which has survived the water shortage quite well.

The ground is just damp enough to encourage the ground feeders. In neighbouring streets the flowering gums are heavy with flower and colleges of these birds feeding on the nectar. (notice the two magpies in the background)
These parrots ( Eastern Rosella Platycercus eximus) are smart enough to know I am just wandering around, and their dinner is of no interest. They watched me for awhile, popped up to their heads so I could get a photograph with my annoyingly inappropriate camera-Oh for a digital SLR-and went on feeding.

the heart of Old England 2...

2007-04-09T11:34:00.000+10:00

This English Oak is on the eastern edge of a small park by the Morack Golf course, ( lat -37 51.06 long 145 12.19E), one of the fairways is immediately behind the tree. Like all oaks here, it is in the latter stages of fruiting, and the acorns on the ground are plentiful.

The morning was crisp, just an early autumn morning, and we had had some badly needed rain during the night, so the grass and leaves were wet, the sun was dulled by thin cloud. It was the sort of morning to do some hard walking. However, one gets distracted...
These are male Wood ducks (Chenonetta jubata), males all feeding on the acorns. They are quite big birds, up to 20" tall, whichmade me think they were some sort of goose. They were unconcerned as I walked past, but immediately became suspicious as I turned to look at the tree, well... them.

They headed out into the park and grazed while I photographed the acorns and tree, had a look at the neighbouring eucalyptus newbeyi, Newbey's mallee, recorded in a very early post (Heading south), but as soon as I left the oak they headed back. I love the absolute regularity of the trailing ducks, and the double space between the leader and no. 2.

uhm....

2007-03-23T13:42:00.000+11:00

This gum (perhaps Spotted Gum E maculata or E. nowraensis) grows in a small space adjacent to this community building at the Blackburn Road end of The Avenue, Blackburn (lat -37 49.07 long 145 09.03E).

Two buildings were joined, but room was made for the tree, and it appears from the left hand branch the tree has made some room for the building.

The young leaves....

The old nuts, I mean fruit...not so old nuts, I mean fruit...

and young flower buds, just weeks old.

the heart of old England...

2007-03-23T13:27:00.000+11:00

Near the Central Road entrance to the Blackburn Lake park car park (lat -37 49.51 long 145 09.55E) is this dishevelled thing, the oak species I know not as yet. It looks more like an overgrown bush but is a tree with the top taken off, so it has failed to grow up, and appears to have collapsed with effort of surviving beside the surrounding pines (along the roadside fence line) and the native trees of the park.

The leaves radiate from the twig...
the bark...
and another side of the tree, showing the main stem lopped.

the new black...

2007-03-16T19:12:00.000+11:00

The median strip between the service road and outbound lanes of Burwood Highway just east of Hanover Street (lat -37 51.51 long 145 11.08E). The black barked trees are quite common around here, and are especially used as street trees, and mostly in median strips. The species is, I think, Red ironbark Eucalyptus tricarpa, a Victorian species once known as E. sideroxylon, but now separated into a new species.

Canterbury Road, parallel with but north of Burwood Highway, has some excellent examples of the same trees used on the median strip. It will be interesting when these trees have reached full height- up to 30m., with a 1m. trunk. Just the sort of thing to appear out of a dark night. This copse is in the median strip between Mt Pleasant Road and Springvale Road intersections (lat -37 50.21 long 145 10.58E). The bark is most distinct, and Australian native trees have barks of a good range of colours, textures, and habits.
Below: the copse from the north side of the road, looking south-west on a cloudy day.

Bark is black, fissured, with a tinge of red at the base of the fissure. My digital camera does not like this black, and immediately turns the colour inside out.
Immature leaves of the Ironbark. The green turns greyish with maturity and gives the trees their distinctive look.
Young buds of E. tricarpa in threes. The buds of E. sideroxylon are in bunches of seven.
Mature fruit from last year.
Mature fruit several years old of E. tricarpa. Has a red polished look.

crash

2007-03-16T16:36:00.000+11:00

'Tis a sad sight one often encounters on the footpaths of our town, of the remains of tree which the local council has determined has to cash its chips. This tree was on Burwood highway, on the north side (approx lat -37 51.55 long 145 11.55E).
A man was cutting the log up with a chainsaw when I happened along. He stepped aside so I could take these pictures. The log was about 4m long.
The rot in the picture above is probably the reason this tree was felled.
The pale area just under the bark at the top of the cut is the beginning of rot.
The rest of the timber appears in good condition. This log is about 50cm in diameter and would turn out a few good planks. Below is another tree which one day disappeared.
A branch high on the pale barked right hand tree broke one night in a bit of wind, and hung about precariously for a couple of weeks. One day the tree wasn't there.
We were left with a stumps....
a pile of wood chips...
and a pile of logs, neatly stacked as one would expect.
Woodchips make useful mulch, and reasonable paper. The country is cutting much of its native forest for chips. Some people, like me, don't like it all that much. Others are concerned with money, or justifications, or money.

epicormic growth

2007-03-16T16:09:00.000+11:00

Eucalypts derived an advantage over their competitors from epicormic growth. The 'shrub' in the yellow circle is on the edge of Culbara Reserve (lat -37 50.5 145 12.61 E), which is neighbour to Campbell's Croft, mentioned in earlier blogs. The area is about 1km north of Boronia Road where it crosses Dandenong Creek.

As one gets closer to the 'shrub', it is really the stumps of, I think, a Yellow Box, which has been cut after the tree has blown down. The 'shrub' is about 2m. high and about the same wide.
This closeup gives some indicator of the growth. The trunk is about 30cm in diameter, the shoots are prolific and hardy. Less than half the root ball is still in the ground, but
gradually another main trunk, or perhaps trunks, will emerge and grow into a tree.
From another site, this time on on the south side verge of Canterbury Road near Stevens reserve (lat -37 50.3 long 145 11.26E). A tree (Stringybark) was recently cut down here, the stump is only a few inches above ground level, yet epicormic shoots are flourishing.
These shoots are soft and almost delicate-if any vegetation native to this country can be so described-but persitent given the dry conditions prevailing.
A nice set of pictures illustrating this persistence of life in the face of fire,epicormic growth is most noticeable after a fire has been through eucalypt forests, can be seen here.

Shepp 2

2007-03-12T00:24:00.000+11:00

Shepparton is a cow town. And a fruit town. It was also the home of Joseph Furphy, who, as Tom Collins, wrote "Such is Life". It is the capital of the Goulburn Valley, which produces much of Australia's dairy exports, AUD3 billion approx., based on irrigation. Drought is bad news in this town, which relies heavily on irrigation.

Not that you would know it unless you looked at the river and the lake. The parks around the Town hall are remarkably green and lush. And it is not just the cows.
Here is a whole herd of them, no milking required. Note the green grass, something quite rare these droughty days.

Cows do this to your weeping trees, trim them off at a regulation height, but are no good at topiary. This is on the way into town, off the Calder Woodburn Memorial Avenue mentioned in a previous blog. Note the lack of green grass here.
Just near the herd of cows is this tree, or rather two trees, Spotted Gums E. maculata, I think.
The tree sloping to the right is named Sarah, perhaps a common name in the area for a tree of this size and shape?
Very nice protruding valves on the fruit

And nearby is this rather small elm, its leaves just changing colour, as one would expect in late summer.
Shepp elms bear strange fruit-4 magpies sitting out of the sun. This must be a bird cafe. The birds didn't seem to be bothered by my camera waving at them.
Here are some leaves, in case I need to find a latin name for this tree, in keeping with my style.

Shepp 1

2007-03-11T23:08:00.001+11:00

Shepparton, (lat-37 22 long 145 25E), is about 190km north of Melbourne. They are having a fortnight long festival, and among the shows was a wood show held in the town hall. Outside the entrance of the town hall is this tree, which I haven't identified as yet, hence the folowing pictures under the fold.

Bark:
Young flower buds:

This year's mature flower buds and last year's fruit.

Calder Woodburn 1917-1942, in memoriam

2007-03-11T22:23:00.001+11:00

This long weekend we went north to visit the in-laws, mainly to collect a Merc 250, 1976 model absolutely spotless, which will be used by my wife. This car will put a stop to my morning walks to the Mitcham station to collect the other car, which have been the source of a few trees. On the Goulburn Valley highway south of Shepparton, Shepp to the locals, is the Calder Woodburn Memorial Avenue, a 20 km long memorial to servicemen who died during WW2, which was initially a memorial by his father to Calder Woodburn who died in Europe on April 2nd 1942. The avenue once contained 2457 eucalypts, however time and roadworks have seen some gaps appear.

Looking south, one can see the four lines of trees. Most avenues of honour in Victoria date from after WW1, and consist of mainly exotic species. Ballarat has one of the most beautiful of the WW1 avenues, there is another on the way into Maryborough. These memorial avenues often have brass plaques commemorating individuals.
Looking south on the east side of the avenue: trees in the avenue are mainly River redgum E. camuldulensis, Sugar Gum E. cladocalyx, Western Grey Box E. microcarpa, Spotted Gum E. maculata, Yellow Box E. melliodora, Sugar Gum E. cladocalyx, and Ironbark E. sideroxylon.
Bark of E. cladocalyx, Sugar Gum. In the background is a Western Grey Box E. microcarpa.

The avenue has begun to self perpetuate, with a good growth of seedlings of all species now appearing between the more mature trees. This is probably because the local council doesn't mow or spray the avenue between the trees, and the grass is quite long, so a good mulch and protection produces new growth.
However, many trees are infected with mistletoe Amyema pendula, which in eucalypts has a very distinct form and colour. Some say it is not destructive and that it provides a useful source of food for animals and birds.
The leaves of the mistletoe are very similar to the host species, and they seem to produce a flower capsule which can be seen in the first closeup of the leaves. You can read more on mistletoe here.

the blues 3

2007-03-09T23:36:00.000+11:00

This is an odd sort of tree for the corner of Morack and Verona Roads, Vermont South. I think it is the Blue Atlas cedar, Cedrus atlantica Glauca. This one is small but there are some larger specimens I have seen whilst driving around the area. Behind this tree are some very old pines forming a windbreak dating back to when this area was prime farm land.

Short grey needles in tight pairs radiating out from a central something obviously with a latin name.Foliage has a distinctive grey blue.
Bark. As the tree matures the bark changes texture and colour. See more on this tree here and here.

2007-03-09T22:16:00.000+11:00

Lilly Pillies are a common street tree in some of our cities. This is Acmena smithii, the common lilly pilly, which is not the common street lilly pily, which is Syzygium oleosum or blue lilly pilly. Both were once called Eugenia. This tree is in the garden of a girl's private school in the inner east of Melbourne. Its location has enabled it to grow to a good size and shape.

The bark.

Fruit and leaves:

The fruit is described as having "succulent slightly acidic edible flesh. The blue lilly pilly is the source of some home made jams, making a thinnish, but not unpleasant addition to the table. I have eaten lilly pilly chutney, which is excellent as a marinade, particularly on baked fish like salmon. In Sweden I baked fish using lingon sylt, which is also tart, as a chutney or marinade.

the blues 2

2007-03-02T14:22:00.001+11:00

I think this is Eucalytus cinerea, Silver- leaved stringybark, or Argyle apple. It may be a best friend, Eucalytus conspicua. My doubts come from looking at the leaf litter, although the fruit buds come in threes, like E. cinerea.

Dried fruit buds picked up off the ground under the tree:
The obviously stringy bark. This tree is in Blackburn,
Leaf litter. Note the ovate leaves, the source of my doubts.
Here is another specimen of E. cinerea. This one is in Vermont South, in a private garden. The tree overhangs the footpath enough to give good access to the leaves. This is photographed towards the light on a dullish day. The conspicuous grey foliage is hard to see here.

The fruit buds. These differ from the Blackburn tree in that the valves come in either three, four or five on a bud. The Blackburn tree seems to have mainly three valves, and three fruit.
The leaves are distinctly silver-grey, or glaucous., opposite (at 90 degrees).

This shows how distinctly silver the foliage is:

the blues 1

2007-03-02T14:21:00.001+11:00

Carrying a camera around whilst looking at trees: one gets to see the obvious. At them moment I can see grey trees everywhere. This is a Cootamundra wattle, Acacia baileyana, which I can now see is quite common around the area, although Cootamundra is probably 1000km north.

Another day, looking south east.
The blue grey foliage contrasts with the light green of the pin oak overhanging from a nearby garden. These trees are in Boronia Road, Vermont, on the south side near the Morack Road exit.
The wattle is flowering, which, according to my book on these matters, is somewhat unseasonal. The long terminal axillaries are budding up well. I shall post a picture when the tree is in full blossom.
Bark:

midnight rambler

2007-03-02T14:11:00.000+11:00

On most weekday mornings I drop the kids off at school and walk the dog up to the station to pick up the car, which my wife has taken to catch the train to Southbank where she works. One house along the path has a fence of pittosporum, perhaps the most uninteresting tree in our gardens-certainly the dozen in my garden which the previous owner planted don't do much for me.
One day, just after I started these walks I noticed the slippers-complete with brown hearts-and they have been there for 6 weeks now. It is not only bark that is interesting, the foliage has a light airiness which makes it beloved of architects and gardeners sent in to prepare houses for sale.
Some weeks later: the gardeners have been in and the slippers and toys have gone.

that time of the year

2007-03-02T14:07:00.000+11:00

Here we are again, the days are getting shorter, a bit of fog in the morning, dew on the grass, the hot days are not as hot as they were, we are all tired. The exotics are beginning to show a bit of colour...

Campbell's croft park 2

2007-02-15T19:37:00.000+11:00

Campbell's croft park has a mix of trees species, deciduous and evergreen, such as these oaks and gums. This is another example of what I like about many Melbourne parks, Canterbury Park (posting on 17th January '07) is another. They are a mix, a sort of bricoleur brew of tidy and ragged, tall and broad, deep green and barely green, old and new, all showing how adaptable we are in making our public spaces.
The bark of these gums is deciduous, and produces a very dense mat of mulch which restricts any competition around the base of the tree. It also acts as a fire retardant. The centre tree produces bark in short strips, the other two in flakes. I think the centre tree is e. cladocalyx, sugar gum, a South Australian tree very drought proof and adaptable.
The bark peels off in strips, on some other species it flakes off.

Eucalypts and associated species have very interesting bark. which changes colour through the year. I will endeavour to record some of the changes.
These gums are flowering quite heavily. The branches contain the fruit of last year, the forming fruits of this year and flowers. Ants, bees, nectar eating birds like parrots, honey eaters, and bell birds can be seen hanging about in flowering trees.
Behind the gums is a row of oaks. The shade is different there, standing under the canopy, and the sunlight beyond is softer, easier.
Oak shade brings out the anglophile in me. These trees seem to thrive in the harsh summer, cool winters we have. This collection of oaks don't seem to have thinned out their leaves to cope with water stress, like some in the centre of town.

Weeping elm

2007-02-15T14:40:00.000+11:00

A rare Weeping Elm, Ulmus glabra camperdownii, in Campbell's Croft park, lat. -37 50.7 long. 145 12.45E. The only self-contained, self possessed tree in the park. Other trees were pines, gums, other elm species, oaks. The tree broods over its patch of grass, which is greener than a lot of other in the park. This species is a cultivar, and cannot reproduce by seed. So this example is the same as all others.
Elm bark, taken in the deep shade the tree provides, so the park, visible through the leaves, is washed out in the photograph.
Several of the branches were severely twisted. This is a feature of the species, and reproduces the original cultivar. It is quite spacious under the canopy of the tree, the leaves form a close cover which would be quite effective at keeping out the rain.
Typical elm leaf shape, however they seem patterned to form a cover which gives the definiteness to the shape of the tree. Form more see here:

mateship 2

2007-02-15T14:32:00.000+11:00

Two species that get on well. South side of Boronia Road, Vermont, near the Moore Street entrance.