Pollinating great ideas ‘A leopard can’t change its spots’ but maybe Melbourne’s Spotted Gums can James Shugg, Arborist, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria It was a breathlessly still autumn morning and I was dangling, perhaps 25 metres above the ground, suspended in the canopy of a large eucalypt. Picking its mature capsules by hand and dropping them into a bag attached to my climbing harness was the relatively less damaging method chosen to collect its seed. The tree was a fine example of the species Corymbia maculata commonly known as Spotted Gum. I paused to take in my surroundings. I was aloft in a big tree standing in the midst of a tall East Gippsland forest. The tree rises above a ridge that is some 300 metres above sea level and yet I couldn’t detect the slightest movement amongst the multitude of gum leaves around me. Stem and branches clad in visually pleasing smooth, purple and grey mottled bark took my eyes on a journey. This specimen appeared to be largely free of deadwood, broken branches and other structural defects. This is remarkable for a bush tree and is a characteristic that can make the Spotted Gums, and particularly those from certain populations, rather well suited for urban planting.
Stem and branches clad in visually pleasing smooth, purple and grey mottled bark took my eyes on a journey. I pondered my luck at being employed in the field of arboriculture and in the more specialised area of botanic gardens arboriculture – a job which had delivered us to this agreeable location. My colleague Peter Berbee and I were on assignment for the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria (RBGV). We were visiting the Mottle Range Flora Reserve 25 km north-west of Orbost. The reserve protects a small, about 1km2, disjunct population of C. maculata. Our mission was to collect seed from these trees. Our purpose was twofold: firstly to propagate the trees with a view to planting out at the RBGV’s Melbourne Gardens site and secondly, to provide seed for storage in the collections of both the Victorian Conservation Seed Bank, situated within the National Herbarium of Victoria, and the Millennium Seed Bank Project in the United Kingdom. Peter Berbee observing flowering, 20 July 2015
the botanic gardener | ISS 45 JULY 2016
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