The drive to Currency Creek Arboretum, an hour south of Adelaide, meanders through the picturesque Mt Lofty Ranges. It’s a landscape of quaint sandstone cottages on gently rolling hills and lush pastures scattered with vast spreading gum trees. The charming scenery feels like some kind of “Australian pastoral” in a tableau made famous by Hans Heysen.
The gum trees are the crowning glory – ubiquitous and distinctive stalwarts of Australian woodlands across the continent. Ninety per cent of Australian forests are dominated by eucalypts, and 98% of eucalypts are endemic to Australia. For the most part, we lump them together under a single moniker, barely paying any attention to which of the 900-odd species and subspecies any particular tree might be.
To the untrained eye, gum trees present a uniform forest of dull grey-green that does not change from one season to the next: “never-greens” rather than evergreens. And yet they are not so much all the same as all very different. It is their individuality as much as their uniformity that makes them so hard to distinguish.
I assume that most of the trees we pass in the paddocks are river red gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis), with their broad, arching canopies and twisted trunks. But the taller narrow ones might equally be South Australian blue gums (E. leucoxylon). The oversized white pillars at the intersections of river and road are probably statuesque mountain white gums (E. dalyrympleana), but their canopy is too high to see from the car. The stringybarks and manna gums blur into one another as we speed along and I have no way of knowing if the dense clusters of low-growing gums in the distance are cup gums (E. cosmophylla) or grey box (E. microcarpa), or something else entirely.
Heysen painted these gums because he was worried they were being cut down for firewood, undervalued and underappreciated. His work invested them with a cultural capital that matched their ecological value. But there is no future for these lone survivors. They are monuments; the last trees standing from the vanished forest ecosystems that once blanketed these hills.
As we wind south, the landscape opens out into patchworked paddocks of golden grasses with distant views of the Coorong and the sea. For Dean Nicolle, this cleared landscape was ideal. The mild Mediterranean climate, low alkaline soil, moderate rainfall and species, 100 and fully 872 species or subspecies: some 97% of all known members of the Eucalypteae tribe.
