White Beech: The Rainforest Years

  My sister was unimpressed by my lack of enterprise. I went on, ‘I couldn’t even see the branches, let alone climb them.’

  ‘As if,’ said Jane, who is six years younger and a good deal fitter than I. ‘Describe what you’ve got then.’

  ‘Simple. Well, I think it’s simple. It doesn’t look like a leaflet. Largish.’ Even in its slightly withered state the leaf was eight centimetres long, with a stalk more than two centimetres long. ‘Stout, er, kind of tough.’

  ‘What’s the word for kind of tough?’

  ‘Coriaceous?’

  ‘Go on. Shape?’

  ‘Egg-shaped, I mean, ovate or obovate. With a slight point. Hairless, or glabrous, if you’d rather, on the upper side, softly felted on the under.’

  ‘Felted?’

  ‘Tomentose.’

  ‘What about the base of the leaf?’

  I was stumped. Jane took the leaf. ‘See how it doesn’t narrow into the petiole? That structure’s probably diagnostic. It’s certainly not common.’

  I believed her, although to me it seemed like the quintessential leaf, leaf-coloured, leaf-shaped, leaf-ish. Jane was warming to her task.

  ‘You’ve already got a stack of identifying characteristics, even in this one leaf. You should be able to key the whole tree out just from that. Palaeobotanists often have to work with less. What you don’t know is leaf arrangement; you don’t know if it’s opposite or alternate, but you do know that it’s not compound. This leaf is as simple as they come.’

  ‘It looks verbenaceous,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t speculate. Investigate,’ said Jane sternly, and got up to clear away. While she washed the dishes, I struggled with the key.

  ‘It begins with leaf arrangement,’ I whinged. ‘I can’t key it out if I don’t know that.’

  ‘What about the edge of the leaf? Is it toothed or frilly or lobed?’

  ‘No. It’s, um, straight.’

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s curved. We describe a leaf that has an uninterrupted margin as what?’

  ‘Oh, entire.’

  ‘What else have I taught you to look for?’

  I knew that one. ‘Oil dots.’

  ‘So get the glass and look for them.’

  I squinted through the loupe looking for translucent dots like a jeweller looking for flaws in a diamond. ‘No oil dots, as far as I can see.’

  ‘What about the venation? What can you tell me about that?’

  That was interesting. The veins were not arranged symmetrically. ‘The veins seem sort of haphazard, and, they’re incised on the upper surface and really prominent on the underside.’

  Jane took the leaf from me.

  ‘Impressed. Not incised, impressed.’

  I ploughed through the Red Book until I was only one page from the end. ‘What about this?’ I read out,

  Leaves 8 to 18 centimetres long, ovate or broad-ovate, bluntly pointed or acute, rather thick and tough, the main veins impressed above, strongly raised and prominent below . . . leaf-under surfaces, softly and densely hairy with fawn hairs—

  ‘Use your glass again.’

  ‘It’s just like thick blond fur! So this must be White Beech.’

  ‘Not must exactly.’ Jane was still looking at the leaf. ‘More may. That petiole’s interesting. It’s quite stout, and channelled on the upper surface.’

  The Red Book didn’t say anything about the leafstalks. ‘Can I work backwards now? Can I look up White Beech in Floyd?’ Alex Floyd is the daddy of everyone who works on our rainforest. Although his Rainforest Trees of Mainland South-eastern Australia was published more than twenty-five years ago it remains by far our most useful reference book; for all those years the publishers, the New South Wales Forestry Commission, remained deaf to all pleas for a new issue. The CCRRS copy had seen such hard service that its boards had fallen off and were now held on by a sticky mess of yellowing sellotape. I had orders in with every specialist bookshop in the world for another copy but nothing was forthcoming. A university press advertised it; we sent off an order only to receive the entirely unnecessary information that the book was out of print. At some point two heroes of the rainforest, Nan and Hugh Nicholson, decided that they would take the matter in hand. They had the original publication electronically scanned, and carefully edited every entry. Then they formed themselves into Terania Rainforest Publishing and published the revised edition in 2008, which was long after the day I sat on the verandah puzzling over my single White Beech leaf.

  ‘Here we go,

  Leaf stalks 15–37mm long, somewhat thick, densely hairy . . . lateral veins eight to ten, straight and forking toward the margin, at 45º to the midrib. (Floyd, 1989, 173)

  ‘What family’s it in?’

  ‘The Verbenaceae.’

  ‘So you guessed right. What made you say you thought it was verbenaceous?’

  ‘The leaf shape, for one. And its feltedness.’ Jane was to have the last laugh after all, because White Beech is not now in the Verbenaceae.

  If my tree was a White Beech, it would bear flowers ‘in large panicles at the end of the branchlets’, followed by blue fruit. It would be those flowers that would remove the White Beech from the company of the verbenaceous, because they are white velvet versions of dead nettle flowers, with petals fused into a tubular bell with a protuberant lower lip marked with ‘two yellow flight-path bars’ and four stamens, ‘a long and a short pair overarching the flight paths’.

  I couldn’t bear the thought of a tree so sumptuous smothered under the heap of rampant Lantana. The CCRRS workforce was supposed to be proceeding in an orderly fashion, clearing zones in sequence, but this was a case for ETR, emergency tree rescue, our first but by no means our last. Nothing is more rewarding than to spy an ancient rainforest aristocrat struggling under a blanket of suffocating Lantana or Kangaroo Vine, and gently to remove its load. It can’t be done quickly; to rip out canes or vines is to rip the tree. Instead we hack our way in under the marauder, scraping and poisoning as we go until all its connections with the ground are severed. The stock and roots are then painted with neat glyphosate stained turquoise blue with a vegetable dye.

  If we’d dragged the Lantana canes out of the old White Beech hundreds of epiphytes, orchids, ferns and mosses would have come out with them. Instead we waited for the canes to die, to become light and brittle and finally to break and fall. The first bearded branches to emerge from the twiggy mess of dead Lantana seemed half-rotten themselves. I watched them anxiously week by week until they began to push out furry new leaves of a thick pastel green unusual in the rainforest. Before the leaves had finished coming in, the great old tree sent up a silent shout of victory and gushed torrents of blossom, china-white cymes that turned violet-blue as they aged. The struggle to get a sight of them involved a good deal of rock-scrambling and tree-climbing and subsequent tick infestation, but the sight of the tree in its glory was well worth it. Amongst the blossoms in the canopy, Sulphur-crested Cockatoos eyed us quizzically, never pausing as they nipped off the big dead nettle flowers at the neck and threw them to the forest floor, while around them a billion insects plundered the pollen and the nectar, laying their eggs in the flower hearts as they went.

  After the torrent of blossom came loads of fruit, flattened spherical drupes of the same china-white and violet-blue as the flowers. We waited till the fruit began to rain down, turning the forest floor fluorescent lavender-blue. As soon as the sun slid behind the edge of the Lamington Plateau, and only minutes ahead of the hordes of small nocturnal herbivores who would grab the fruit and hide it away for future consumption, we would gather up all we could find, mindful of Floyd’s grim account of propagating White Beech.

  Germination is very slow, such as 37% after five months. Percussion and shell removal is either not feasible or beneficial. Flesh should be removed and seed soaked for 2 months, then dried in the sun for one day, followed by further soaking before sowing. (1989, 173)

  Half the fruit I gave away to a pro
fessional grower. The rest I prepared myself. Nothing about soaking seed for two months made sense to me. As my eyes had become attuned to the green of the White Beeches in the canopy I knew that the species did not specially favour creek sides. Immersion of the seeds for two months sounded too much like drowning, but I guessed they did need an alternation of very wet and quite dry. Most growers of rainforest species soak the freshly gathered fruits overnight to drown the larvae that will otherwise hatch in almost every one and eat the seed kernel before it can germinate. The activities of the larvae clearly reduce the fertility outcome for the tree, but in the crowded rainforest environment long-lived trees like the White Beech are in no immediate need of hordes of descendants. Seedlings that germinate from the fruit might have to wait years, even generations, before a gap will open in the canopy and trigger their upward surge. Most of the extravagant crop of the White Beech was destined to be used by the other denizens of the forest, and they included me. My self-appointed task was temporarily to maximise the White Beech’s reproductive potential so that it could reoccupy its old niche in the forest. Whether this is a realistic aim or a useful objective was by no means clear to me, but I felt in my bones that I had no choice. Someone, something else was calling the shots.

  After the fruit had soaked for a full twenty-four hours, I took on the toil of peeling off the drupe, which was more woody than fleshy, to lay bare the squat round nut with its inset lid. Within minutes my hands were thickly coated in an odd-smelling brownish exudate, that so stuck my fingers together that I could hardly wield my knife. I struggled on for hour after hour as my fingers got pulpy from repeated immersion and stiffened under the relentless build-up of the exudate, which I had regularly to peel off my fingers with the knife blade. As I got progressively clumsier the knife found more opportunities to slip off the small wet nut and bury its short blade in my palm. I had no way of knowing, as the uncomfortable hours crept by, whether what I was doing was for the best, or even necessary. I let the seeds dry off, but not in the sun, tucked them into a special compost in an old broccoli box scavenged from the supermarket, wetted them through, and put over them a car-window pane that I had found lying under the old farmhouse. For six months the box remained forgotten on a shelf, among old woolsacks, broken furniture and rusting machine parts. It was one of my mad ideas. No one else was interested, and anyway, it would never work.

  When I came back from England six months later, I made sure that my box was one of those placed in our makeshift propagation unit, where it would be watered automatically twice a day. A month went by. I didn’t even ask about my box because I was so sure that the effort had been wasted. Now and then I’d check to see that the lads hadn’t thrown it out or planted something else in the box. I was fussing over Garry’s bull terrier bitch one morning when Garry stuck his head out of the door of the propagation unit and said, ‘Sump’m here you should see.’

  At first I didn’t recognise the five plantlings that stood stiff and erect in the loose planting medium, five furry stems each bearing a single pair of leaves, not entire like the leaves of the adult parent, but with five teeth on each margin. (This phenomenon of dissimilarity between juveniles and adults is not uncommon among the primitive Australian flora.) Though the first five leaf pairs of the baby beeches were different in shape from those of the parent tree, they were the same unmistakeable kitchen-cabinet green. Every day more baby beech trees popped up until we had 150 of them standing proudly side-by-side in their old polystyrene box. I don’t know how people feel when they win the lottery, but I’ll bet they’re no happier than I was then.

  We could have grown more, but White Beech is not dominant in our forest. Rightly or wrongly (and there is disagreement on the point) we are concerned to keep our own races pure, at least until we know more about the exact identities of our species, subspecies and varieties, and the extent of their variability. In none of the books could I find any account of the asymmetric venation of our leaves, which can make them look quite lopsided. I know now that the leaves are opposite, but the leaf veins are mostly subalternate, and some actually fork where they leave the midrib. I don’t know if the oddity of the leaves on the CCRRS trees puts them in a different variety or subspecies, but I do know that we won’t mix them up with White Beeches from further away, not yet anyway. The issue is more important than it might seem. Speciation is an ongoing process; the Cave Creek Gmelinas with their lopsided leaves may be in the process of turning into a distinct subspecies or even a species, in which case we should let nature take its course rather than accidentally or deliberately causing our clones to revert to an earlier type.

  Botany is an inexact science. What is more, frequent name changes make Australian plant taxonomy rather more challenging than it needs to be, especially as the ill-tempered factionalism that characterises all academic disciplines leads some botanists to leap on the new names as soon as they appear while others steadfastly refuse to use them. Gmelina leichhardtii has been that for a good while now; what is not clear is just who has accepted that the genus is in the Lamiaceae, or why. The taxonomic problems presented by the genus Gmelina and allied genera are currently being investigated by the Lamiaceae Team of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. As long as they think White Beeches are lamiaceous that’s good enough for me.

  When Victorian government botanist Ferdinand Mueller came to identify the specimen of White Beech that had been collected by Ludwig Leichhardt at Myall Creek on 20 November 1843, he decided that it was in the related genus Vitex, and gave it the species name leichhardtii (Fragmenta, 3:58). At Kew George Bentham had the advantage of being able to compare the specimen he was sent with other members of both genera, Vitex and Gmelina so, when the name was published in Volume 66 of his Flora Australiensis, it was silently corrected to Gmelina leichhardtii, the specific name being allowed to stand. Mueller greatly admired Leichhardt, which is about the only thing I am happy to have in common with him. Other observers have expressed less favourable opinions (Chisholm, passim). Because Leichhardt’s way of being a naturalist (as distinct from his way of conducting expeditions) seems to me the right way, I shall impose upon your patience by telling you more than you probably want to know about him.

  Ludwig Leichhardt was born in Trebatsch, Prussia in 1813, sixth of the eight children of the Royal Peat Inspector. He was accepted by the universities of both Berlin and Göttingen to study philology, but in November 1833 he met a young Englishman called John Nicholson who turned him on to natural science. When Nicholson’s younger brother William came to Germany in 1835, he persuaded Leichhardt to change his field of academic study at the University of Berlin to natural science. As Leichhardt’s family did not have the funds to support him, he had been living in direst poverty. William Nicholson offered not only to share his accommodation with Leichhardt, but also to pay his tuition fees and other expenses. When Nicholson returned to England he invited Leichhardt to join him there so that they could collaborate in studying natural science, in preparation for a career as explorers of Australia. The two travelled and studied together in France, Italy and Switzerland. They were together in Clermont-Ferrand when, on 24 September 1840, Nicholson announced that he no longer intended to follow a career as a naturalist in Australia but would return to England and practise as a physician. Nicholson paid for Leichhardt’s passage to Australia, and his clothing and equipment, and gave him £200 in cash.

  Leichhardt arrived in Port Jackson on Valentine’s Day, 1842. For six months he looked for employment in Sydney; then he set off alone on an expedition from Newcastle along the Hunter and across the Liverpool Range to New England, collecting and annotating as he went. After resting a while at Lindesay Station he travelled to Wide Bay and it was on this part of his journey that he collected the first specimen of White Beech at Myall Creek. He was then invited by Thomas Archer to accompany him to his brothers’ property at Durundur on the Stanley River and use it as the base for his explorations of the district. Leichhardt remained at Durundur for seven months
, and then set off back to Sydney. On the way he stopped at Cecil Station on the Darling Downs where preliminary plans were laid for his next, far more ambitious enterprise.

  An overland expedition from Sydney to Port Essington had been recommended by the Legislative Council in the hope that it would open a lucrative trade route between south-east Asia, India and the colony. The surveyor-general Sir Thomas Mitchell had agreed to lead the expedition but Governor Sir George Gipps refused to authorise ‘an expedition of so hazardous and expensive a nature’ without support from the British government. When Leichhardt offered to lead an expedition of volunteers, newspaper editors decided to assist him in raising a private subscription. The route chosen led from the Darling Downs to Port Essington on the shores of the Arafura Sea, a total of 4,800 kilometres. The ten men involved, with their 17 horses, 16 bullocks, 550 kilos of flour, 90 kilos of sugar, 40 kilos of tea and 10 kilos of gelatine, left Jimbour on 1 October 1844.

  They travelled north along the Burdekin, the Lynd and the Mitchell rivers to the shore of the Gulf of Carpentaria, which they followed to the mouth of the Roper River before turning inland, skirting Arnhem Land to the east. Though Leichhardt had few bush skills, and was happier rambling and botanising than working out logistics, it took them less than fifteen months. They reached Port Essington on 17 December 1845. On the way two men had left the expedition and John Gilbert, himself an expert bushman and naturalist, had been killed by Aborigines. No one had suffered from the scurvy that had crippled Sturt’s expedition inland from Adelaide, because of Leichhardt’s awareness of the nutritional value of the native herbage he saw around him. The team returned by sea to Sydney where Leichhardt was greeted as a hero.

  Leichhardt lost no time in raising money for a second expedition and this time the government came on board. The plan was to cross the continent from east to west. The team left in December 1846, but managed to cover only 800 kilometres before flooding, malaria and starvation forced them back. Leichhardt then set off on his own to explore the country around the Condamine River.