White Beech: The Rainforest Years (5 page)

In the 1920s attempts were made to grow White Beech in plantations. A visitor to the state forestry nursery at Imbil on the Mary River reported to the
Brisbane Courier
on 28 June 1924:

During the last two years attention has been paid to white beech, which takes from six to twelve months to germinate. Propagation in the nursery is easy, but being tremendously deep-rooted there is a difficult task to prevent injury when raising for transferring to the plantations . . . With the use of tube planting the difficulty of damaging the young plants has been overcome. In white beech plantation it is necessary to enclose the areas with wire netting, as wallabies eat the leaves as fast as they grow. Growth is thus checked. For this reason, and the expense involved, growing of white beech has not been extensively undertaken.

Rainforest trees are seldom ‘deep-rooted’, let alone ‘tremendously deep-rooted’. They live by clutching at rocks with fans of spreading buttresses. The mistake that was made at Imbil is to be found in the word ‘plantation’; if the foresters had planted White Beeches as members of a forest community and not as a monoculture, the wallabies that graze all over the forest, sampling rainforest fungi, grasses, ferns and palms as well as trees, would not have eaten all their leaves.

Since the Imbil experiment few if any forestry projects have featured White Beech. Recently Super Forests Plantations called their new 74-hectare plantation which will ‘produce quality saw-logs from a range of quality hardwoods’ ‘White Beech’, but of the more than twenty thousand trees that have been planted there, not one is a White Beech. Just over the southern lip of the Mount Warning caldera, at Rocky Creek Dam, the local county council has used White Beech in plantations of ‘cabinet species’ on abandoned dairy farms within the catchment; out of a total of twelve species White Beech is coming ninth in the growing race, so the proliferating plans for ‘farm forestry’, in which landowners cease clearing and replant native forest for sustainable wood production, are unlikely to feature it. There is now no White Beech timber to be had anywhere. A recently updated statement on the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries website tells us simply that ‘Sawn timber of these [
Gmelina
] species is not readily available. Other species of
Gmelina
are imported from Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Fiji.’

The old-growth White Beeches at Cave Creek survived either because they were crooked or because they grew in places that the timber-getters couldn’t get into, or couldn’t get the timber out of, whichever. Fewer than a dozen mature White Beeches in sixty hectares is not much, but it will be enough. We have literally thousands of Red Cedars in all phases of growth from the oldest to the youngest, but the tree that for me typifies the specialness of Cave Creek as a Gondwanan refugium is White Beech.

Here’s the how-and-why.

I hadn’t been responsible for the forest long, when I paused on my pre-breakfast walk to watch Golden Whistlers popping in and out of an immense pyramid of Lantana on the creek edge. As the whistlers skimmed about me, I turned my binoculars upward till there was nothing to see but sky. Such a vast pyramid of Lantana had to be sprawling over a seriously big tree, but what? Most of the leaves that I could pick out among the canes arching out of the top of the towering heap were still Lantana, pale-stemmed, matt, bright green, cordate. Others, a very few, were different, bigger, denser, with a stout network of leaf veins visible against the light. I poked around on the ground under the Lantana canes and found a thick yellowing leaf, still greenish on one side, buff-gold and slightly felted on the other. I tested it against the faraway shape I could see outlined against the light. It matched. I hunted about for more but found none. I put the single leaf in my trouser pocket and took it back to the house.

An hour later, when the white flare of the sun had spilled over the scarp and the air was full of sizzling radiance, I betook me to the shade of the verandah for a homemade caffe latte and a bit of botanising with the field guide we call the Red Book (Harden, McDonald and Williams). My sister Jane, who was on holidays and hence not expected to go marching off at the first light of dawn, was having a late breakfast. Jane is a proper botanist and my willing but demanding preceptor in matters botanical.

‘So?’ she asked, mopping up the last of her stewed tomatoes with her last bit of toast.

‘It’s a leaf,’ I said.

‘Was that all you could get?’

‘The tree’s enormous, a hundred feet high or so, but it’s completely covered by Lantana.’

(If you look up White Beech on the net, you may come across an advertisement that assures you that it is ‘a fast growing, deciduous, small to medium tree’ that will grow no more than eight to ten metres in your garden. A White Beech recorded at Terania Creek, New South Wales, came in at 59 metres tall and 2.65 metres round.)

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 professional 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.