More Than Skin Deep

Antonio Vivaldi: prolific Italian composer famous for The Four Seasons 

If Antonio Vivaldi had been a wine grower, I wonder if we’d have ended up with a very different Four Seasons. Might we have had musical evocations of leaf-fall, bud-burst and harvest, for instance, rather than spring, summer, autumn and winter?

Or if he'd been a Yolngu man in north-east Arnhem Land, might we have had The Six Seasons? For Yolngu, concepts like spring and winter make no sense. Instead they have built a six season calendar around local weather, food, and seasonal activities.

For instance early March is Waltjarnmirri. It’s the wet season proper, when flooding restricts travel, and people are concentrated around their camps. They will look forward to late March, when it will be Mirdawarr. By then hunting and fishing outings can begin, and bush vegetables will become plentiful again.

Wherever we live there are regular natural patterns that signal changes in the year. Some of these seasonal changes may be obvious, but others are more subtle, requiring a long and attentive familiarity with a home range.

After a mere 25 years in this place, I’m still a new-comer. But I am starting to notice some very particular seasonal patterns.

Take our local silver peppermint (Eucalyptus tenuiramis) for instance. Visit at most times of the year and you’ll find a prudish tree, grey-trunked, slim, blotchy and easy to overlook. Visit in late summer/early autumn and you’ll happen upon a different creature altogether. Much of the dowdy bark is gone, piled around its feet like clothes discarded in passion. 

A Eucalyptus tenuiramis with recently-shed bark, South Hobart, Tasmania 

Instead this Clark Kent of trees now stands proud and glowing in the fickle forest sun, trunk and boughs alluringly smooth and creamy gold. En masse tenuiramis trunks can light the forest like candlesticks.

During today’s walk I notice that the bark shedding is incomplete on some trees. Giving in to a child-like impulse I pull on one of the skeins dangling from a youthful tree. The grey, dead bark peels up the tree with a small but satisfying crackle. I tear free a ribbon of bark perhaps 3 metres long and examine this source of the tree’s once dowdy looks.

Free of its coat, the trunk is a luminous wonder. It will hold these golden good looks perhaps until the Yolngu are beginning to burn Arnhem Land’s dried grasses and woodlands: around May in our calendar.

Eucalyptus tenuiramis woodland during early autumn, South Hobart, Tasmania

Regardless I will keep visiting these Tenuiramis woodlands, and will keep finding their beauty, even when the cold winds force them to again don dull protective coats. Beauty is never out of season. And nor is it skin deep.

Tenacious Tenuiramis

[A silver peppermint tree clings to the edge of a stone quarry in South Hobart]

What a vantage point we have, caught as we are between earth and sky! You might technically call our dwelling place superficial, but taking into account the vastness of the universe, it is an extraordinarily uncommon superficiality.

There are some trees near home that highlight for me this amazing event horizon; this junction of heaven and earth. Both are humble trees, silver peppermints (Eucalyptus tenuiramis). One stands atop an old quarry in Strickland Avenue. Perilously close to the edge, the twin-trunked tree clasps the crag with crooked hands like Tennyson’s eagle moreso than a tree.

Often eucalypts have shallow roots, and certainly lack the tap roots that we associate with many plants. Rather they splay out strong, sometimes buttressed roots that give them a good toe-hold against storms. This particular peppermint stands on mudstone with a very shallow soil overlay. Both rock and regolith are poor sources of nutrient, and highly prone to drying out. So the tree has grown used to the botanical equivalent of thin gruel. And yet it has done far more than eke out an existence.

It has a handsome golden-flecked double bole, each trunk creased and rumpled, stretching and tapering with a slow and crooked patience towards the sky. Its irregular branches, some clean and straight, others arthritic and contorted, seem all well-covered with narrow grey-green leaves.

Here and there past difficulties have produced failed branches, some hollowed out to owl’s-nest perfection; others still pointing in mute accusation at an unblinking sky. The tenacity of tenuiramis is illustrated elsewhere in our local woodland, a place much put upon by fire, feet and mountain bikes.

[A reclining tree? This Eucalyptus tenuiramis has a very unusual growth aspect]

This tenuiramis seems just a sapling in terms of height, although a hard life may have stunted it. It faces up the slope, almost recumbent, as though it's about to succumb to fatal wounds. Yet on closer inspection I can’t help smiling as I see a nyad extracting her feet from a hole, or a dryad frozen in the act of escaping. No, this tree too is thriving, with a good covering of leaves, and a fair chance of weathering the prevailing nor-westers for decades to come.

I find G.K. Chesterton’s fanciful description of a tree very apt here. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats. Tenacious tenuiramis, I dips me lid to you!