In this edition, Ray has a wonderful collection of stories and pictures of trees from at least three different continents. And he has included a recent note from a long-time subscriber.
Above is a picturesque photo showing a King Billy Pine in the left foreground, with Cradle Mountain in the background. Cradle Mountain is on the famous Overland Track (which I have travelled three times) in West Tasmania.
In my previous article of May 2015 I described techniques used for timbergetting in Victoria in the 19th Century. In this article I take the subject further by looking at record-breaking trees and unusual trees in Australia and the United States.
Northern Hemisphere readers do not have many species of trees, I hope this article is of particular interest to them.
Mountain Ash trees
This is a photo of a giant tree in Victoria, probably a Mountain Ash, with a horse demonstrating the size of the stump.
Mountain Ash trees became legendary in colonial Victoria for their size. The Mountain Ash is in fact the tallest flowering tree in the world, distinguishing it from the non-flowering conifers of the Northern Hemisphere.
My estimate is that the tree would have been at least 300 feet tall. I have no idea how the trunk would have been cut up after the tree was cut down, because when it was lying down the trunk would have been almost as high as a two storey building! No crosscut saws would have been long enough to cut through the trunk.
World’s tallest existing softwood trees
The tallest trees in the world are the Sequoias which grow in the California area in the United States.
Probably the most famous of these trees is the “General Sherman” tree in this photo. The tree called “General Sherman” is not only the biggest giant sequoia, but it is also the biggest tree in the world (as distinct from the tallest tree).
The tree is 83.8 m (274.9 feet) tall, circumference at chest height is 24.10 m (79 feet) (near the ground its circumference is 31.3 m or 102.6 feet). The width of the crown is 33 m, and the first branch starts at 40 m or 130 feet! Its estimated volume is 1487 cubic metres.
However the General Sherman is not the tallest tree in the world. This mantle goes to a coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), named Hyperion after a person in Greek mythology. The tree is no less than 115.72 m (379.7 feet) tall! This enormous tree was discovered as recently as 2006 in a remote part of the Redwood National Park, California.
Using the Empire State Building’s statistics of 102 storeys for a height of 1250 feet (380 metres) the Hyperion tree would reach the 30th floor of the Empire State Building!
Closer to my home, the tree’s top would have been towards the top of the arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, measured from water level.
The tallest existing hardwood trees
The tallest living eucalypts can be found in Tasmania. The tallest one, named “Centurion”, is a swamp gum. It is now (having previously lost some of its canopy) 99.6 metres (328 ft) tall and is the tallest living hardwood tree in the world. Its volume has been estimated at 268 cubic metres (significantly less than the General Sherman tree).
This eucalypt tree was originally discovered in 2008 by using a laser mounted on a plane. The laser reading was altered slightly when a workman climbed the tree and measured it.
Surprisingly, the tree was only discovered recently because it is located in a secondary forest and survived logging and forest fires by lucky chance. My wife Diane and I visited it several years ago. This was quite simple because it is actually less than 50 metres from a sealed road which I would have driven along as a rough gravel road in 1964 when I was embarking on a fourteen day bushwalk in Tasmania’s wild South West.
The tallest historic hardwood tree
Here is one of my favourite photos, showing two families sitting on a huge stump, no doubt celebrating the fact that the men had cut down a huge tree (probably a Mountain Ash).
Stories of gigantic trees abound in Australian folklore, similar to stories about mythical bunyips, giant crocodiles and “the fish that got away”.
However the tallest Mountain Ash of which the height was measured with some certainty was 375 feet (114.3 metres). The reason for the certainty was that it was measured after it was cut down. It was logged in Victoria (Australia) in 1884. This was only four feet shorter than the current softwood record-holder in California (“Hyperion”, 379.7 feet), referred to above. At the time it was far taller than any building in the world and must have been an impressive sight.
Baobab trees
Baobab trees (now called boab trees) have by far the broadest trunks in the world. There are nine species of the baobab tree, six from Madagascar, two from Africa and one from Australia. The African and Australian baobabs are almost identical despite having separated more than 100 million years ago.
The Glencoe baobab in Limpopo Province, South Africa, was considered to be the largest living individual, with a maximum circumference of 47m (154ft) and a diameter of about 15.9m (52ft). The tree has since split into two parts.
The Derby Baobab Prison Tree
Here is a photo of the famous Derby Prison Tree in Western Australia. It has a girth of 14.7 metres. It is hollow inside and there is a doorway at the front.
The Derby boab has stood stoically for around 1500 years. As boab trees age, their trunks eventually become hollow. Several people could easily stand inside one of them.
The Derby boab tree has become a major attraction visited by local and international tourists and protected under WA’s Register of Heritage Places. The statement of the site’s significance in that Register says, in part, that the tree “represents the harsh treatment prisoners often received in the north of Australia in the late 19th and early 20th century”.
However, research has shown that the Derby boab was never used as a jail. Over time, the myth of the Derby prison tree being used to house prisoners has been so often repeated that it has gained the status of a “fact” that is simply not supported by available evidence.
Huon Pine
The Tasmanian Huon Pine is a slow-growing, but long-lived tree. It grows to 10 to 20 m tall, exceptionally reaching 30 m.
Huon Pine is highly valued for cabinet making and boat building. It is extremely durable. However, due to intensive logging, it is also now quite rare.
Huon pines are some of the oldest living organisms on the Earth. A stand of trees in excess of 10,500 years old was recently found in western Tasmania on Mount Read. Each of the trees in this stand is a genetically identical male that has reproduced vegetatively. Although no single tree in this stand is of that age, the stand itself as a single organism has existed that long.
Individual trees in the clonal patch have been listed as having ages of 2000 or even 3000 years old.
Because of the long life of individual trees, tree rings from Huon Pine have been used for dendrochronology to establish a record of climate variation.
King Billy Pine
I have included this tree mainly because it is shown in the photograph at the start of the article. Its habitat is located in south west Tasmania. Its uses were boat building, joinery, shingles, sounding boards in musical instruments, and vats.
Waldheim, a famous lodge at Cradle Mountain National Park, was built from King Billy Pine by Gustav Weindorfer, an Austrian immigrant who played a key role in the protection and preservation of Cradle Mountain.
Antarctic Beech Trees
This is a photo of Antarctic Beeches at Springbrook near the Queensland-New South Wales border.
Antarctic Beech trees grow to a very old age and a famous for their very large buttresses which support the trees, demonstrated by the buttresses in this photo. These trees typically grow to 25m (80ft) tall and have large trunks to one metre in diameter with scaly, dark brown bark.
Requiring the unique environment of a cool temperate rainforest between altitudes of 500 metres and 1550 metres, Antarctic Beech trees grow in only a few spots in Australia, including Springbrook National Park. This species of tree once covered Antarctica, before its present iced-over state.
These trees propagate by the very interesting method of coppicing. The tree sends out new shoots radially from the base of the original trunk, and these shoots eventually grow into clones of the parent tree forming a ring of trunks, all (technically speaking) belonging to the one tree. Many individuals are therefore extremely old, some about 12,000 years.
Wollemi Pine
Here is a photo of a juvenile Wollemi Pine.
An article about famous trees would not be complete without a mention of the famous Wollemi Pine. It is in fact a fairly nondescript tree to look at, but its fame lies in the fact that it predates the dinosaurs.
Wollemi pine, (Wollemia nobilis), is a member of the conifer family Araucariaceae and the only member of its genus. Wollemi pine was found in 1994 growing in a remote canyon in Wollemi National Park, about 100 km (60 miles) northwest of Sydney. It was only known through fossil records until the Australian species was discovered. The tree grows to a height of 40 metres in its natural habitat with a trunk diameter of over one metre. The Wollemi Pine, nicknamed the “Dinosaur tree” or ‘living fossil’ is one of the greatest botanical discoveries of our time.
Speaking of botanical discoveries our reader Ian Olsen has, incidentally, discovered a very rare eucalypt tree which has the very restricted habitat of one hectare on a remote rocky mountain range in southern New South Wales. It has been officially named “Ëucalyptus olsenii”. This species remained unknown to science until a small party of bushwalkers visited the area in April 1971 and the unusually large wrinkled gum nuts attracted the attention of the walkers. Ian collected specimens and submitted them to botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney. A specimen is growing in the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden.
Congratulations Ian on this achievement. Most botanists could only dream of having a plant named after them.
Conclusion
I hope you have enjoyed this voyage into the realm of unusual trees.
An email from Laurel Gray (nee Jerrems)
Recently I received the following email from my second cousin Laurel, who readers may remember spent some years serving on missionary stations in New Guinea with her late husband Laurie:
Dear Ray Your latest Jerrems family newsletter brought back lots of memories, As a family we loved to go to Mount York and my mother was very good at teaching us about the crossing of the Blue Mountains, Blaxland Wentworth and Lawson and that epic journey down over Mount York. the towing of heavy logs behind the drays to slow them down going that that steep slope. My maternal grandmother lived at Wentworth Falls from 1936, during the war I spent my 3rd grade year with her and my aunt, we did lots of walks in that area.
One memory is of a walk I took with my parents down the National pass from the Wentworth Falls to the Valley of the Waters. We were caught in a thunder storm and lost the track under the cliff. I remember the leeches which were very persistent, I was about eight years old. When we finally emerged up the Valley of the Waters end of the track a search party had been mobilised to find us because of the heavy storm.
One of the last walks I did with my husband was on the Six Foot Track from the Explorers Tree to Jenolan Caves, another wonderful memory. Thanks for stirring up the memories!
I am about to have my 88th birthday heading for 90!. it’s hard to believe but I’m still going strong and enjoying life in the Independent Living Units at Gerringong. It is five years since Laurie died . This afternoon I will join some friends in our Community Cottage for some games of Rummicub. Laurie’s sister is in the Residential Care here, we enjoy Scrabble and Rummicub three times a week. She, Margaret is still very active.
Lots of love, Laurel (Jerrems) Gray
We extend our best wishes to Laurel, who has been following our progress with the Newsletter since its inception.
So far I have written three articles about Laurel and Laurie’s sojourn in New Guinea, I will follow this up soon with a fourth article.
