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Some Unusual Trees

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Re: Some Unusual Trees

#81

Post by lmpdev »

danwills wrote: post #80
lmpdev wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who grew up with a Quandong in their backyard please don’t plant quandongs without serious planning It grew 40m in ~10 years and spanned ~200-300m^2

Wow! I have not heard about that! A 40m tal! Quandong!? Crikey! Tallest I've seen is about 10m. I guess they usually don't get that big in SA. Must have been ideal conditions for it in your case and maybe it happened to be a particularly vigorous/fast-growing variant!? I have heard that it can be hard to get the seeds to germinate (sounds like it was working without troubles on your property!) I'd actually be kinda h…

Yeah the Blue Quandongs get pretty big

Tweed Valley in NNSW so lots of water and volcanic soil

Edit: turns out the Blue Quandong and the Quandong are very different species - my mistake

Re: Some Unusual Trees

#82

Post by danwills »

lmpdev wrote: post #81
danwills wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! I have not heard about that! A 40m tal! Quandong!? Crikey! Tallest I've seen is about 10m. I guess they usually don't get that big in SA. Must have been ideal conditions for it in your case and maybe it happened to be a particularly vigorous/fast-growing variant!? I have heard that it can be hard to get the seeds to germinate (sounds like it was working without troubles on your property!) I'd actually be kinda h…

Yeah the Blue Quandongs get pretty big Tweed Valley in NNSW so lots of water and volcanic soil Edit: turns out the Blue Quandong and the Quandong are very different species - my mistake

Ah wow that is awesome, thankyou for clarifying that! Today I learned there's another native fruit with a similar name, but you're right it's a totally different species! Good to know!

I wondered, since quandong sounds like an Aboriginal word, whether it might be similar to what happened with the word 'sapote' in South American fruits. I have heard that it means 'soft fruit' and hardly any of them are even related species!: White Sapote (ice-cream fruit, it's amazing, related to citrus) Black Sapote: might not quite live up to the name chocolate-pudding-fruit, but a perfectly ripe one is still delightful imo, related to persimmon) I haven't tried Mamey Sapote yet or any others.. something to look forward to! :)

I'm envious of that volcanic soil! Quite clay-y in the Adelaide Hills.. I have had a white Sapote in the ground for years and it's still less than 1m tall :/ don't know if it will ever fruit.. should care for the soil better I'm guessing, that might get it going :)

Re: Some Unusual Trees

#84

Post by ikr678 »

mykowebhn wrote: post #18

I would say the Eucalyptus tree, planted all over the world but native to Australia, is quite unusual. Young Eucalyptus trees have leaves that are rounded and are arranged opposite to one another. However, when mature the leaves of a Eucalyptus are lance-like and are arranged in an alternating fashion. This to me is quite unusual.

The lance-like down pointing shape is so that they can rotate slightly to reduce surface area exposed to hot sun (and reduce transpiration/water loss).

Re: Some Unusual Trees

#85

Post by hcs »

abound wrote: post #33
bombcar wrote: post #23

This is (was?) the advantage of a printed encyclopedia - one that I've never really been able to replicate scrolling wikipedia. I think it has more to do with the limitations and lack of linking than lack of information (each of these trees has a wikipedia article). A wikipedia dive session is likely to get more and more specific into trees (attacked by twees!); an encyclopedia flip session is more likely to go acros…

In the age of LLMs, it wouldn't be hard to build a UI on top of a Wikipedia dump [1] that satisfied any particular idea of serendipitous flipping. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

Or you can just hit the Random button https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

Re: Some Unusual Trees

#86

Post by mykowebhn »

bacheaul wrote: post #73
mykowebhn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Although in their native Australia they grew quite straight. It's the introduced trees that grow not so straight and make bad railroad ties. In areas where they are introduced, they also become quite invasive by practicing something called alelopathy, whereby they introduce toxins into the soil to prevent competing tree species from taking hold. While I'm at it, Eucalyptus trees have very very dense wood which…

Eucalypt forest fires are bad because the leaves are full of oil and when it's hot, dry and windy, they're extremely flammable and the fire races through the tops of the trees at incredible speeds, and jumps across large fire breaks that appear to be wide enough that they should stop it. But at the same time the wood is also very dense, so makes great campfire wood, but doesn't burn so much in a forest fire, which is…

I had to verify so I just checked with Claude (I was lazy) and you are correct.

Thanks for pointing this out!

Re: Some Unusual Trees

#87

Post by mykowebhn »

awesome_dude wrote: post #68
mykowebhn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Although in their native Australia they grew quite straight. It's the introduced trees that grow not so straight and make bad railroad ties. In areas where they are introduced, they also become quite invasive by practicing something called alelopathy, whereby they introduce toxins into the soil to prevent competing tree species from taking hold. While I'm at it, Eucalyptus trees have very very dense wood which…

> While I'm at it, Eucalyptus trees have very very dense wood which means the wood burns very hot. This makes it even worse for forest fires where Eucalyptus trees dominate. Forgive my ignorance, but I had understood the density of the wood meaning that the trunks of the trees were less likely to burn in a forest fire (which eucalypts encourage by shedding large amounts of dry bark)

I just learned about this.

Thanks for pointing this out!

Re: Some Unusual Trees

#88

Post by benj111 »

helterskelter wrote: post #38
mykowebhn wrote: post #18

I would say the Eucalyptus tree, planted all over the world but native to Australia, is quite unusual. Young Eucalyptus trees have leaves that are rounded and are arranged opposite to one another. However, when mature the leaves of a Eucalyptus are lance-like and are arranged in an alternating fashion. This to me is quite unusual.

It's funny, a neighbor had me cut their eucalyptus down, then it grew back from the stump and I had to cut it again a couple years later. Then I has to cut it again a few years after that. Now it looks like I'm going to have to cut it again soon. It's become a running joke at this point. Those things are tough, and they grow really fast in the right climate.

Drill some holes in the stump and pour in some weed killer/diesel/creosote.

Re: Some Unusual Trees

#89

Post by benj111 »

lmpdev wrote: post #81
danwills wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! I have not heard about that! A 40m tal! Quandong!? Crikey! Tallest I've seen is about 10m. I guess they usually don't get that big in SA. Must have been ideal conditions for it in your case and maybe it happened to be a particularly vigorous/fast-growing variant!? I have heard that it can be hard to get the seeds to germinate (sounds like it was working without troubles on your property!) I'd actually be kinda h…

Yeah the Blue Quandongs get pretty big Tweed Valley in NNSW so lots of water and volcanic soil Edit: turns out the Blue Quandong and the Quandong are very different species - my mistake

>NNSW

North New South Wales??? Or interesting compass direction?0

Re: Some Unusual Trees

#90

Post by CRConrad »

addaon wrote: post #44
jvm___ wrote: post #42

Since we're talking trees. Only trees that grow in an area with distinct warm/cold cycles have rings, tropical trees don't and the only way to tell the age of most tropical trees is to have planted it yourself

Wouldn’t a tree without rings still reasonably capture the atmospheric C13:C12 ratio as it grows? Or is the carbon motility within the trunk too high, or the ratio differences too small, to sample a bit near the core and use the ratio there as an age indicator?

Could be (I have no idea), but it sounds like that would be possible to investigate only by complicated laboratory tests. Not a visible change that makes it easy to calculate age by just sawing up a cross section and counting visible rings.
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