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 The River Red Gum

Not one of ours, I’m afraid, this month – January takes me in memory to Australia and its magnificent gum trees. There are something like 800 species of eucalyptus, but few grander than the river red gum, Eucalyptus camaldulensis, which thrives along the rivers, creeks and gullies of Victoria, South Australia and southern New South Wales, anywhere the soil is occasionally saturated and has enough clay in it to retain moisture. There are said to have been river red gums as tall as 45 metres, but today most are huge spreading trees, forming the characteristic park-like landscape of, for example, the Barossa Valley north of Adelaide.

I photographed this tree in an open forest of scores of its kind and size in the Eden Valley, east of Barossa. Gum trees hardly give any shade; their narrow leaves hang down, letting the sun reach the trunk and the ground beneath – a fact that gives early Australian paintings (often of sheep under the trees) their aethereal golden glow.

The name Camaldulensis comes from the garden near Naples where the newly-introduced species was growing when it was first described by a Neapolitan botanist in 1832. Sadly we can’t grow it in Britain, nor any eucalyptus of such a size. Our best at Saling Hall is a beanpole of a tree: E. dalrympleana, 55 feet (nearly 17 metres) high, straight and unbranched to nearly 30 feet. I prefer E. parvifolia, planted at the same time, 20 years ago, branchy and heavy-headed but the sort of dark dullish green that fits unexotically into our winter landscape.

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