A gorgeous photo from Lofty, featuring silver birch, manna gum, and stringybarks. What a great surrounding to live in. Click for full size.
Photo © Lofty.
Eucalyptus Forest Tangle
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Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
A gorgeous photo from Lofty, featuring silver birch, manna gum, and stringybarks. What a great surrounding to live in. Click for full size.
Photo © Lofty.
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So beautiful. It must smell great, too. I loved the Eucalyptus trees in California.
Eucalyptus are fine for Australia, but anywhere else they’re a nuisance. They demand way too much water for an arid or desert environment (like my own), burn easily and are poisonous, so they don’t provide as much nutrition as the trees they replace.
…but I guess they do smell nice. Better than Callery pear for sure.
Well, Blue Gums have been an iconic part of SoCal for ages, and I have always enjoyed them, but they have also always been controversial, and more so in recent times.
That said, I haven’t seen or smelled a eucalyptus tree for over 20 years.
The smooth grey trunks look like giant lichens and provide nice contrast to the foliage and other trunks.
Those have to be the silver birches. I love birch trees of all kinds. Had tons of them back in SoCal, but here in ND, Paper Birch (Betula papyrifera) dominates.
Hi everyone!
The youngish silver birch is the dark knobbly bit out of focus to the right, it’s a trick of the early morning light and it normally looks quite bright. Being autumn here it’s just yellowing its leaves. It just happened to be in the right place to frame this view, one I couldn’t see by naked eye. The beautiful pale trunks are of the Manna Gum, favourite Koala food supply. The other trees are Stringybarks, another eucalypt that grows mainly on the leached soil ridges in high rainfall areas of the Mt Lofty Ranges. Across the street on the sunny side of the ridge there are none of these. And their smell is subtle and easy to get used to. You only notice it when you return from the city and you open your windows at the top of the street. All of our local area was clear felled around the 1940’s so the mature trees all have multiple trunks. One of the three trunks of the Manna Gum was cut down by the local council at my request some years ago because it was leaning towards the house and a similar one had crushed another house not far away the previous week. It’s on the reserve next door. Nothing like a bit of bad news and a threat of insurance claim to make a council move!
It’s fascinating to use a good quality digital SLR for the first time, I haven’t used the old film SLR for over a decade. Your own property looks sooo different in a view finder because the frame is so tiny compared with naked vision. The lens being off my old SLR has to be manually focussed and it allows me to pick out elements in the scenery to showcase. Quick shots are all out of focus! I took a couple of shots of the Kookaburras being fed this morning, I see that I will need more practice in setting up the focal distance as the little beggars are moving around 20 feet away. If the resident koala comes to visit I’ll try to get him in the frame. They are slow moving and travel across the ground to get from tree to tree. They seem to have a home range of around 10-20 acres so I don’t see it every week.
Lofty:
Ohhhh. Those are gorgeous! Best of luck on the animal shoot, it’s exciting when you get a good capture.