A little botany- part 1

TreeFlip image courtesy of Rob Wiltshire.

I wanted to share a little botany with you this morning, I've been talking about the timber we're using to build the hut, and it wasn't til the other week when my workmate asked me "what is myrtle", that I realise not everyone has (mis)spent their youth traipsing around the bush looking at the native plants!

Luckily for me I know the author of TreeFlip quite well, and he was happy for me to share the relevant pages. I do laugh at his descriptions, I think his personal bias towards certain timbers for furniture or his favourite plant for honey are thinly veiled!

Celery top pine was named for the celery-like appearance of its "leaves". These are actually not leaves but flattened branches called cladodes, that have taken over the photosynthetic role for this tree. The trees can get up to 30m tall and look like this:

Image courtesy of http://www.tastimber.tas.gov.au/SpeciesDetailsGeneral.aspx?SpeciesID=9

Celery top is a natural, durable and tough, fine grained timber. The wood is creamy white when freshly cut and darkens to a mellow rosy gold hue over time and with exposure to sunlight. Slowly grown, it has a hardness, strength, and density not normally associated with conifers.

Image as above

The timber for the outside of the hut is vertical, dressed, celery top boards. It looks quite blond at the moment (similar to my old hair colour) but once coated it will darken to a golden honey colour. Rob is heading down today to start coating the boards, at the moment they're in our bedroom and the hall way to keep them from the rain.

Anyway that's enough botany for this morning!

Botanising

Red seeds of Pittosporum bicolor (Photo: Rob Wiltshire)

This week is a little odd for me; I feel I should be at Mt Field National Park immersed in native plants with Rob.

Nothofagus gunnii - deciduous beech or fagus (Photo: Rob Wiltshire)

The week long field trip was the highlight of my undergraduate studies, and in later years I went along to help out with the students. Even though the itinerary is the same every year, there was always a new plant, fruit or flower to find.

Notelaea ligustrina – Native Olive (Photo: Rob Wiltshire)

It’s where I learnt that “the bush” is not one homogenous form, but varies with altitude, rainfall, aspect, soil type or underlying rock. I came to learn what species of plants are indicative of rainforest, dry or wet eucalypt forests, alpine or moorland. How each site is different even within these broad vegetation types. To break up the vegetation into layers: canopy, understory, and groundcover. How plants adapt to the environment with leaf shape and size. Or indeed how many species converge into a cushion or micro herbfield to survive in alpine areas. To identify plants by flowers, colour, leaf shape or smell.

This brings me to a few tools I wish I’d had when I was learning. EucaFlip and TreeFlip; Rob’s two publications to help anyone identify Tasmania’s native eucalypts and other trees. Now this may seem biased, but I think they are quite beautiful. You can find out more about them here. But it doesn’t tell you that upon request, a class set will be distributed to any school in Tasmania for free. Children love them, and are great at using them to identify trees, a wonderful way to get them interested in our native flora. So here’s hoping for a whole generation of Tasmanian botanists.