Tuesday's Trivia.

....a staggering 24,000 species of native plants have been identified compared to England's 1700 native plants . The Culture Portal

John Williamson sings about a home among the gum trees with its verandah out the front, clothsline out the back & the odd kangaroo or two. We have all that. Which stands to reason. Eucalypts are the most common species of anything around here & can grow up to 50 metres.

Eucalypt comes from the Greek & means *beautiful bark* ~ & bark is often one of the outstanding features of a eucalypt. Stringy bark gums come with hairy hides where the bark peels in long wiry fibers. In other species it peels in long ribbons. Yet in others the bark flakes to reveal the new gorgeous creamy salmon wood beneath. Round here we get lots of iron barks which have rough bubbly bark. Distinctive, I think, is the term best used.

Eucalypts are tall but shallow rooted with high oil content leaves hanging vertically & providing scanty shade. They are often deliberately planted to drain swamps & we have 2 very large species growing below the high water mark on our foreshore. Their wood burns hot & for a long time so they are an excellent firewood.Euculypts is what everyone thinks of when they think Australian tree. They're those things koalas live in & koalas eat gum leaves ~ though the reality is they will only eat the leaves of certain species. Eucalypts are as common as mud. What scientists get really excited about is the wollimi pine. I am not going to tell you how old scientists think this species is. If you believe in *young earth* the figure will be just wrong & anyone else can go look it up. What is exciting is the wollemi is considered a *living fossil* known only through fossil remains until 1994 when David Noble discovered one growing in the Wollemi National Park near Katoomba, land of the 3 sisters. Wollemi is an Aboriginal word meaning "look around you, keep your eyes open and watch out". What is scary is that only 40 trees are known to exist in the wild though a conservation effort is under way that has all sorts of people growing & cultivating them. Why not? Apparently they make a good indoor plant. At a full height of 40 metres I don't think so! However they do have the lowest known genetic variability of any plant species.
Then there is the Huon Pine ~ one of the oldest living trees on the planet & the first Australian conifer to be exploited commercially. It can grow for 1 200 years but even more interesting is the Mountain Ash which has the notoriety of being the tallest flowering plant in the world though no living species is taller than the long lived Californian Redwood at 115.55 metres & currently the world's tallest tree. Unlike most Australian trees the Mountain Ash does not rejuvenate well after fire & is propagated only from seed. It does, however, grow at the rate of a metre a year & heights have been recorded of 140+ metres. Between January & March white flowers appear, lasting for 1~2 weeks, followed by pear shaped fruits. Leadbeater's possum requires mature Mountain Ash for nesting & lyrebirds often like the understory as the Mountain ash produces 3 times more leaf litter than most other species while in a forest of Mountain Ash none of the crowns touch each other.