trees

Woko greens

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The walk below the cliff face at Woko National Park is all about green. Rock-edged paths wound up and down through the greenish light, as if in a carefully designed garden.

Not just green leaves, but mossed and lichened trunks and roots and vines, some of which curl like serpents around rocks and trees.
Thus securedly earthbound on the steep scree slope, they head skywards to the light. Sometimes the vines had overwhelmed the host with its weight and pulled it down, laden with staghorns or birds nest ferns.

Some greens were to be avoided, like those of the Giant Stinging Tree, beautiful in the backlit canopy, whether alive, or dead and eaten into lacework.

Looking up, the forest crept along the base of the cliff, where green struggled in crevices and clawholds to clothe the rock.

Looking out, where the rainforest had been breached by fallen trees, the view past the densely colonising vines was still all green, but of lighter, brighter shades as pastoral lands were revealed in the distance.

This tiny nest was made of living green lichen; small fantails had been seen nearby. This nest was empty, but others found one with a blue speckled egg inside.

Spectacular verticals

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Sometimes your eyes are drawn skywards by Nature doing the same; sometimes they have to be guided.

Recently I visited some sandstone ridge country, very different from my own, hence a fascinating new world to me. 

In one, a beautiful place called ‘Eagle’s Drift’, I was taken to see this massive nest, so high up that I’d not have thought to look.

It’s a Sea Eagle’s nest, not made of grass and twigs like the nests I usually get to see, but of big sturdy sticks.  This is nowhere near the sea, but these eagles come up the river, I was told. The White-breasted Sea Eagle is not quite as big as a Wedge-tailed Eagle, but  — as the nest shows — they are big  birds! Males can be about 76 cm (30 inches) and females 86 cm (34 inches).

My bird book describes a Sea Eagle as ‘like a huge stiff-winged butterfly in flight’. The caretakers of this property, which is how they see their role as owners. are so lucky as to see both these majestic large raptors using their airspace  — ‘drifting’ or not.

The other vertical that struck me, not far away in the Goulburn River National Park, were the ‘grass trees’, Xanthorrhoea australia, sending their flowering  spikes soaring above their grass skirts. They can reach up to three metres (10 feet).

Many of us don’t catch these slow-growing sci-fi plants when in flower and only know their brown ‘spears’, which were partly why their early common name was ‘Black Boys’. Birds and bees love the nectar in each tiny, spidery blossom. 

Native colour

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The dreary grey-greens and browns of the Australian bush did not appeal to many early settlers, used to soft bright English and Irish greens.

As with many of our flowers, you need to be up close — and unblinkered — to see just how varied and colourful our trees are.

My indigenous rainforest trees have a range of colour surprises, from subtle burnished bronze to vivid lipstick pink. Being in an upside-down world, new leaves rather than old are coloured, as in the Lilly-Pilly.

This pink toothbrush grevillea is flowering on the only branch left to it — which is the one hanging out so far over the track that the wallabies can’t reach out from the bank to break off or up from the track to pull down to strip.  Hardly a well-balanced shrub, but if I prune it, they’ll eat any new growth and that will be the end of it — and no more pink blooms for me.

And if tree trunks are supposed to be boring brown or grey, just look at this young Blue Gum, a glistening olive green after rain.

Tree tortoise

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Strong winds find weak branches on mountainside trees like mine, and I am always wary on wild days. This time I heard the crack from inside the cabin, and crossed my fingers it hadn’t landed on the track.

It had, but only the tops of the branches, so easily chainsaw-able.

Except, as they were springy and green, I stupidly got the blade stuck twice. My handsaw freed it.

I put the chainsaw down to move the sawn branches aside, and as I cleared a space, to my astonishment I uncovered a Long-necked Tortoise, just sitting on the track, peeping out of its shell and probably equally astonished at the leafy roof that had suddenly landed on it.

I went to fetch gloves — and the camera.  It had totally tucked itself inside the shell by the time I returned, and remained so as I picked it up and carried it down to the dam. I assumed that’s where it was from originally, but where it was heading I couldn’t guess. How strange for it be there just as the branch fell — and how lucky that the heavier part missed it; even a tortoise shell can be crushed.

Hoping it wasn’t hurt, I placed it partly in the water.  What if it was stunned, what if it drowned? But soon small bubbles began to rise.

After maybe five minutes, one leg extended into the water, and then the head emerged, showing the distinctive pointed nose and bright eyes that are all I usually see in the dam. It was fine!

Tree shapes

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I have finally gotten around to cutting back the verandah’s vines of wisteria and ornamental grape. They have twisted around themselves and each other to form very strong and sculptural outstretching limbs.

This year I am experimenting with leaving more of their extremities, their claws, poised to shoot green fingers further than before perhaps.

Beyond them, against the always leafy eucalypt forest backdrop, the never-pruned birches form fine traceries that catch and hold the light.

As the cold windy weather kept me indoors more, and with an unresolved writing project requiring distraction from mounting anxiety about it, I dug out the craft paints bought long ago — for a rainy day project. They’d been on a sale table somewhere; some were metallic, and colours were limited.

My pantry doors are visible from the front door; they were blank, bland, boring plain. Now they bear a stylised tree with a gold vine twining up its improbable fruiting branches.

As always, I now wish could fix the mistakes evident from a distance but lost to me when it was under my nose, and I wish I’d made it more conical —  but I think I like my new winter tree, a compromise between bare shape and summer bearing.
 
And I can always paint over it if I decide I don’t.

Sandstone geometry

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In my last week at Goulburn River Stone Cottages I was taken on a walk up the Gorge towards the famous Drip, approaching it this time from the opposite direction.

This took us past giant jumbles of rocks, some midstream like beached battleships, others landed on their sides not far from the cliffs that had let them go.

I was astonished at the amount of very straight lines, as in the edges of pools, or the mighty sharp-edged slab, a stone lamington with a nibbled-out underside. (Photo by Robert Bignell)

But there were equally amazing rounded shapes, curves in cut-outs, rolls, loops and overhangs, and extraordinary suspensions, created over eons. None are meant to cope with the shocks of underground mining.

China has impressive gorges too; as they don’t have the world’s best environmental record, I wonder if they plan to undermine close to them, as they do here at their Moolarben coal project, owned by Yanzhou.

In this spectacular overhang, being inspected by my friend Gail Bignell of The Old Brush there’s a Lyrebird’s nest (circled) tucked up on a shelf. (Photo by Robert Bignell)

But the large old Angophoras that fringe the gorge rival the rocks in curves and add the grace of their dangling branches and leaves. As we sat under this beauty for our picnic, lulled by the river burbling past below, the peace was broken by the cries a pair of Peregrine Falcons, who flew out from their nest in the cliff opposite to chase off a Wedge-tailed Eagle.

What a special, special place.

Tree dwellers

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Collecting kindling, I happened to walk around the back of the big tree whose roots cradle my ‘insulator’ bird water bowl on the other side.

From the different perspective, the early morning sun illuminated something incongruously light-coloured high up on the rough brown trunk.

It was a fat fungus but I could see little detail until the light was brighter.

Even then, it was hard to see over the top of it, and what I photographed didn’t match anything in my fungi books.

Luckily I knew where to go: Gaye’s fungi blog. I looked down her list of fungi by colour. ‘Beige (without gills)’ I thought was a good bet.

And there it was:

‘Laetiporus portentosus, commonly called White Punk, forms large, thick brackets on living Eucalypts. It causes white heart-rot to the host tree… Brackets can reportedly reach 350mm wide… The upper surface of the fungus has a slightly ‘velvety’ texture and can be off-white, beige, to a warm ‘biscuit’ brown colour — the pock-marked under-surface is riddled with tiny larvae’.

 There’s more on her site — Gaye’s knowledge is first-hand, first-rate and a boon to people like me who are interested but not very informed.

I am a little worried about the ‘heartrot’ she mentions, given that this tree is already host to a few young Native Cherry (Exocarpus cupressiformis) trees, which are parasitic on the roots.

However, while I was around this rear side, I saw a fresh view of one tree dweller that won’t be harming it.

The orchid buds that I photographed at its base not so long ago have shot up into leggy adolescents, sheathed in white silk.

Nature is full of surprises.

Bare-skinned gum trees

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Late summer, and the smooth-trunked gum trees here have shed their bark clothes– perversely, just as it’s getting chilly. This  one near the path to the outdoor loo astonishes each time I walk by with the amount of bark strips from just one tree. No wonder we build up such a good fuel load for bushfires.

I always want to stroke the new bare trunks, cool to the touch, and yet warm too, with their slight dimples and bumps.

It was only in the photo, not the flesh, that I noticed this engaging detail (right) — an arm and hand, rather Gollum-like, pensively poised on the chin of this emerging face.

Even the saplings contribute a lot of bark to the forest floor, rising shamelessly bare and beautiful from their shredded skirts (left). The bigger ones here are often multi-trunked — the only reason they weren’t logged 50 years ago. The early morning sunlight has tinted this one with apricot, which I am admiring when I spot yet another detail.

Backlit spiders’ webs on a nearby Angophora, a complex of levels and patterns, given solidity for just a few minutes until the sun rises higher. What a world of surprises!

Lemon Tea trees

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I love all natural lemony scents and flavours. I love lemons, and have many lemon trees of the cultivated and bush varieties, never wanting to be without lemon juice or peel in the kitchen.

But I also have two native trees with lemon-scented leaves.

This little beauty is the Lemon Myrtle (Backhousia citriodora), and I pick and dry its leaves to add whole to my teas.

On the tree, you have to crush a leaf to get the perfume. The beautiful starry clusters of flowers are a bonus I hadn’t expected from this Queensland rainforest tree.

The other is a Lemon Scented Ti-Tree or Tea Tree (Leptospermum petersonii). It too can be used to make tea, although I haven’t. It’s grown into a lovely spreading shape, and the slightest brush against the leaves does release a strong lemon scent.

From a distance — like the house — the simple white flowers seem to dust the tree with light snow.

This one has a history: it seeded itself into a pot of aloe vera I had sat beneath the only tree in the tiny back yard of an inner-Sydney semi I was renting.

I love chance seedings — and freebies! 

Back to normality

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I had been worried about the aberrant, non-fruit pinching behaviour of the seasonal fruit-pinching birds like the King Parrots and the Bower Birds.

They had allowed me cherries, mulberries, figs and peaches — as they never had before.

But then last week normality returned, as the King Parrots squawked  and gorged in the tall and heavily-laden Nashi tree, knocking many fruits and quite a few leaves and twigs to the ground, nibbling bits out of many other Nashis in the tight bunches. I had judged them not advanced enough to pick and let ripen indoors, but clearly I was wrong.

Look at the expression on this one’s face, caught with a beakfull of Nashi flesh, on the alert in case I was going to shoo them off, or approach too close.  What a gorgeously coloured bird!

I’m sort of glad they are behaving normally again; but I’d better pick what’s left of those Nashis…

Lemon tree life

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On one common lemon tree in my yard — and I have raised many, never wanting to be short of lemons — I have discovered  a busy metropolis of green creatures.

This bejewelled and banded, spotted and spiked emerald caterpillar is one of about a similar six that I could easily see — the inquisitive bristling head of another is just visible to the lower left of the beauty on full display.

Plenty of evidence of leaf munching, and plenty more leaves to munch. Other caterpillars looked less relaxed, and a couple were arching, perhaps getting ready to change from the butterfly larva it really is, to the next stage, the pupa.

A few years ago I had photographed a similar knobbly green pupa or cocoon on another ‘proper’ lemon tree in my orchard and my web visitors had identified it for me as that of the Orchard Butterfly.  But I never saw it hatch, or the Butterfly.

You can see the fine ‘silk’ attaching it to the stem — and what great camouflage!

Coincidentally, while circling this tree looking for more butterfly life cycle evidence, I found my tiny New Year frog again. This lemon is right next to the hydrangea where I saw him then, so it could be the same Eastern Dwarf Tree Frog.

And then, on the same damp day, but on a different and very non-citrus tree, I was lucky enough to spot the Orchard Butterfly herself — big and boldly patterned and very still, perhaps drying those gorgeous wings.

It’s interesting that all the three stages of the life cycle are present at once. Is this usual?

Forest fires

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Many early colonists thought the Australian bush a drab monotone of greyish green, blinded as they still were by the vivid lime greens and emeralds of their European trees and mist-made lawns.

I hope closer acquaintance taught them to see more clearly – if they hadn’t cleared all the bush around them.

At present my forest’s greens of a million hues are lit by fiery reds and hot pinks as new spring growth announces its presence.

These small ferns (left) prefer the shadier side of the mountain but are particularly beautiful when backlit, set alight by sunshine striking into a clearing. I stopped on the muddy track to capture the moment as their individual tongues of fire flamed amongst the grass.

The sunny side of the forest holds its fires high, blazing in bunches through the dense older growth and across the sky. We may not get autumn colour, but I challenge anyone to say that our eucalypts are drab or lacking seasonal variety. These gum tips are downright pretty!