There are times I, and many others, question my sanity, deciding to write up a key to the Eucalypts of the Hunter has been one of those times. It was all going well till I got to the Stringybarks and Mahoganies. I’ve been wading my way through it for the past couple of months and will likely take another couple to complete and we’ll probably have to do a special edition of the Scoop to cope with it.
So, (and yes, I know, starting a sentence and paragraph with “so” will probably give the recovering school teachers we have on staff conniptions and I’m also not sure how they are on my use of the Oxford Comma) this month we’ll look at something which is a Stringybark but not a Eucalypt. Intriguing?
Stringybark, yes, Eucalyptus no. Turpentine (Syncarpia glomulifera) bark.
The thing I really love about Turpentines* (Syncarpia glomulifera) is that their seed pods look like little spaceships that were drawn by an 8 year old, and that just makes them so easy to identify, but, being serious botanists we need to describe them as “Fruit a capsule; fruiting hypanthia from each dichasium fused to form a woody, multiple fruit” or “Multiple fruit globose to depressed-globose, 10–20 mm diam., hairy or sometimes glabrescent”
Turpentine fruit, see, just like little spaceships.
Closely related to Eucalypts, the Turpentine is a tall tree with very stringy bark found along the New South Wales coast north from about Batemen’s Bay and inland to roughly the Blue Mountains and the gorges of the Wollemi National Park. They are generally found on margins of rainforest and moist areas and are also quite common around the Cessnock area.
Leaves are opposite, ovate to narrow ovate, dull, dark green above and usually white and hairy underneath.
Turpentine leaves, upper and lower sides.
Turpentine germinates readily from fresh seed, looking very much like Eucalypt seedlings (all images P. Melehan)
The timber was popular in the 1800’s for making piers as they were resistant to marine worms and barnacles, the timber is also resistant to whiteants.
(*as discussed previously use of common names with plants can be problematic as one plant can have numerous common names or a number of plants can have the same common name and that is the case with Turpentine with a number of unrelated plants ranging from scraggly shrubs to the magnificent Syncarpia glomulifera sharing the common name of “Turpentine”)