Latest news with #Eucalyptusregnans
NZ Herald
21-06-2025
- General
- NZ Herald
The Good Life: The mighty Greytown gum
Greytown has been celebrating trees generally for much of its life. Photo / Greg Dixon Greg Dixon is an award-winning news reporter, TV reviewer, feature writer and former magazine editor who has written for the NZ Listener since 2017. The sign is emphatic. 'Historic Tree', it declares, pointing at the tree in question, an old gum which is so enormous it almost certainly doesn't require a sign to get you to notice it. The giant exotic must be as tall as a four-storey building. This is the sort of thing you expect to find when promenading in Greytown, the most genteel of South Wairarapa's three main townships. The townsfolk appear to be very, very proud of their colonial heritage and are quite meticulous about labelling it. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that every house and business on the main street, which happens to double as SH2, has a small sign on it describing the building's provenance, proclaiming things like, 'This tōtara cottage was built in 1853 by the Rev James Cuckoo, the town's first religious crank. He was hanged in 1888 for blasphemy.' I might have made that up, but you get the olde worlde picture. In a town so interested in celebrating its colonial built-history, it comes as no surprise to the visitor that the village's current burghers also honour – and festoon with signs – the more notable colonial plantings, as well. This isn't something new. Greytown has been celebrating trees generally for much its life; the country's first Arbor Day was marked in Greytown on July 3, 1890. Which brings us back to the 'Historic Tree'. It, along with a slap-up lunch at the White Swan Hotel (make sure you have the dumplings and the crème brûlée) was what brought us to fair Greytown on a fair winter's Saturday. Listed as 'the Greytown Gum', the Eucalyptus regnans is one of the six finalists in the fourth annual Tree of the Year competition, a contest run by the NZ Notable Trees Trust. Also competing this year is a Morton Bay fig in Auckland Domain called 'The Fairy Tree', the 'Phantom Rātā' in Bay of Plenty, a redwood at Rangiora Borough School, 'Te Herenga Ora', a cluster of tī kōuka (cabbage trees) in Christchurch and 'the Chook Tree' at Waianakarua in North Otago. The last is a macrocarpa which looks a bit like a giant chicken. To strengthen that claim, it has a giant fake egg next to it, which is chicanery if you ask me. To qualify for the competition a tree has to be 'special' to a community and also have a bit of a story to it, which Greytown's 'Historic Tree' most certainly has, according to one of its three signs. It reads: 'Samuel Oates Gum Tree 1856'. The story goes that our gum tree was one of 12 seedlings pushed in a wheelbarrow over the Remutaka Hill track from Wellington in 1856 by a bloke called Samuel Oates, a task given to him by one Charles Rooking Carter, whose name now graces nearby Carterton. As anyone who has ever driven over the Remutakas will tell you, they're bloody steep. So it is no surprise that on arriving with the seedlings in Greytown, Samuel Oakes decided to wet his whiskers at the Rising Sun Hotel (since deceased). It was while slaking his thirst with local ale that three of the 12 seedlings were pinched from his wheelbarrow by person or persons unknown. What is known is that all three were then planted in various parts of Greytown. Now, 169 years later, only the one with the three signs remains, making the Greytown Gum the sole survivor of not just history, but of a highway robbery. Which means the emphatic road sign has it all wrong. It shouldn't say 'Historic Tree', it should say 'Historic Crime Scene'. While Michele and I were admiring the Historic Crime Scene, two young women stopped to have a gander at it as well, so we told them about the gum being in the Tree of the Year competition and encouraged them to vote for it before the ballot closes on June 30. One shook her head. 'I'm going to have to vote for a native,' she said earnestly. There was a pause. Then she turned to the giant gum. 'Sorry,' she said.
The Guardian
12-04-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Seeing Australia's beloved gumtrees dying makes my insides knot. If they can't survive, how can we?
Last week I went to Adelaide to see a man about a tree. The man was Dr Dean Nicolle and the tree was actually 10,000 eucalypt trees and mallees, of over 800 species, which Dean has been planting on a block of land south of Adelaide since 1993. Dean's passion for eucalypts is incredible. It makes me realise that so much conservation happens purely because someone is just absolutely captivated by something. And thank goodness Dean is, because his love for the eucalypt made the Currency Creek Arboretum, which is designed to bring together all of Australia's eucalypt species in one place for research. During my visit, I'm taken aback by the beige-brown landscape, and how the grass crunches like cornflakes underfoot. South Australia is in the grip of its worst drought in 40 years. Dean is conducting drought studies on his trees, about a third of which are dying, or have curled up and died in the last few months. He says he's noticed the drought has particularly affected the stringybarks in the Adelaide Hills. As a communications professional working in climate media for years, I am used to reading terrible climate news but this hits different. There is something about seeing trees dry out and turn brown, with bark splitting and leaves desiccating, that makes my insides knot. I feel like there's a warning implanted deep in my subconscious from way, way back that says: if the trees can't survive, neither can you. Of course, eucalypts are historically a great survival story. Known generally as hardy and drought-resistant, Australia's iconic eucalypts have weathered ice ages and count their lineage from 52m years ago, when Australia was still part of Gondwanaland. There's also evidence that they've survived bushfires for millions of years. Can they survive us? As burning Australia's coal and gas fuels more severe and frequent bushfires, heatwaves and droughts (on top of land clearing, deforestation and disease), our trees are finding their limits. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has warned that 25% of eucalypts are at risk of extinction, with more added to their Red List of threatened species in 2019. With about 840 species, eucalypts are highly diverse but many species only have a small distribution and are highly adapted to that particular area. This can make them particularly susceptible to localised climate impacts. If only trees could uproot themselves and walk to a more favourable location and climate. Take Tasmania's stunning tall forests, for example, home to Eucalyptus regnans, the tallest flowering tree in the world. They grow to their impressive height because they have adapted to cool summers and high rainfall. This means they have little wriggle room and a changing climate, with more droughts and heatwaves, is causing dieback. The increased frequency and intensity of bushfires has also seen 60% of Tasmania's largest known eucalypts killed by fires since 2004. Over lunch after the Currency Creek Arboretum visit, Dean, his partner Annett and I chat about how we cope with 'solastalgia' (or eco-anxiety) and watching extinctions in real time. Dean says he is trying to view the death of trees he's nurtured for decades through a research lens. Annett, also a scientist, enjoys kickboxing to cope with these big feelings. I say I find swearing helpful. More useful than swearing, however, is the work being done to protect vulnerable populations, and invest in adaptation and research such as the Nardoo climate-ready revegetation project. Meanwhile, I will try to do my little bit to foster a love of eucalypts through art and comics. During the long drive back from Adelaide to Sydney, as the landscape turns from brown to green again, I keep looking at the bag of gumnuts Dean gave me to draw. They are like wondrous jewels. I want everyone to know and love them so they can have a safe future. Jess is a cartoonist, environmental storyteller and current Dahl fellow with Eucalypt Australia
The Guardian
29-01-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Global ‘gigantism' hotspot: Tasmanian tree standing at almost 100m tallest in the country
Australian researchers have documented the tallest and most massive living trees in Tasmania, a 'global hot spot of gigantism in plants', including 18 examples over 90 metres. Most of the largest and tallest were Eucalyptus regnans, commonly known as mountain ash, including a tree known as 'Centurion', measuring 96 metres, according to new research in the Australian Journal of Botany. Located in the state's Huon Valley, Centurion was once the world's second tallest specimen, behind 'Hyperion', a coastal redwood in California measuring 115.6 metres. But that was before bushfire damage in 2019 cost the mountain ash almost 4 metres in height and several rungs on the global ladder. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email It is now ranked sixth among the tallest living species, behind the coastal redwood, a Himalayan cypress, sitka spruce, douglas fir and a tropical species from Malaysia, Shorea faguentiana. This made Australia, and especially Tasmania, a 'global hot spot of gigantism in plants', according to co-author Dr David Bowman, a professor of fire science at the University of Tasmania with a background in eucalypt ecology. Bowman said Tasmanian eucalypts were the 'kings and queens of the forest' that were achieving 'the physiological limit of what a giant tree can be'. They were able to reach their enormous size – in height and mass – due to Tasmania's 'cool nights, beautiful growing conditions in the day, an abundance of moisture', and had grown over hundreds of years without disturbance. Most of the 25 tallest trees in the state ranged in age between 320 and 500 years old, and according to the paper, they towered above the tallest known trees in other states. Victoria's tallest tree, a mountain ash dubbed 'Slinky Sloan', measured 93 metres. Western Australia followed with a 78 metre Karri tree, while Queensland's 'Big Bob', a flooded gum, measured 72.8 metres. In New South Wales, two different gum trees vied for top spot, both measuring 71 metres, while there were no known trees above 70 metres in South Australia, the Northern Territory or ACT. The paper also catalogued the largest examples of trees by trunk volume. The most massive – with a trunk measuring at 463m3, and a diameter of 6.14m – was 'easily the largest known tree in Australia'. These giants were an 'extraordinary expression of life', with significant cultural and environmental value, Bowman said. Yet many lacked official plans for their conservation, he said, and faced multiple threats due to their age, increasingly frequent and severe fires and climate change. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion The paper's co-author, Brett Mifsud, who has been gathering data on tall and giant trees in south-eastern Australia for close to 35 years, said Tasmanian fires in 2019 had been 'utterly devastating' killing 15 of the largest 25 trees known at the time. Fire could enter into existing hollows and cavities of very old trees and burn slowly for days, if not weeks, he said. Sometimes trees survived the fire, but later collapsed due to structural damage. Rachel Nolan, an associate professor at Western Sydney University and an expert in forestry and fire ecology who was not involved with the study, said in order to survive and reach those heights, mountain ash trees needed long fire-free intervals. While many forest eucalypts were resilient and resprouted new leaves in response to fire, mountain ash was a species that was often killed by bushfire, she said. But even other large eucalypts, thought to be more resilient, were showing high rates of large tree loss due to more frequent, intense fires. 'When you get more fire, you get more injury to trees,' she said,.'If you get enough of that the trees will just fall over.' Large, ancient trees provided valuable habitat and carbon storage, Nolan said, adding on a personal note 'there's something magical about these big, tall trees that's really inspiring and that we don't want to lose as a society'. Mifsud agreed. 'As a human, we want to be able to see the biggest, the best, the most wonderful things, and we're in danger of losing those things through climate change.' 'To be bereft of such wonderful things because we didn't look after them, or didn't have a plan to look after them, would be a tragedy.'
