Ghost Gums #1

For those of you who have never been here, Australia is covered with different species of Eucalyptus trees, even in places where not much else grows. In the southeastern part of Australia, where I live with most of the country's population, these native trees have some rather interesting features that are quite different from the trees where I grew up.

Instead of dropping all their leaves in the fall, they drop things year round. Leaves, branches, bark ... it all goes, a bit at a time, all year long, year after year. Sometimes the bark decides to go like the shedding skin of a snake so that, over a couple of weeks, the bark comes off in big strips or sheets or in clumps. The resulting textures always catches my eye and can vary from tree to tree.

The photos over the next couple of days were taken of some ghost gums (or maybe they were snow gums) in the Botanic Gardens in Canberra.

Another interesting feature of the trees around here is that the things they drop off -- leaves, branches, bark -- are all saturated with eucalyptus oil. And eucalyptus oil, in addition to smelling good, is also rather flammable. So, year after year, out in the bush or in the National Parks that ring the capital cities, this stuff piles up. Add a couple of years of drought, hot dry days with hot dry wind blowing a gale and a dry lightning strike (or arsonist), and you have the perfect recipe for bush fires that can spread in no time before that hot, dry wind.

When we have a total fire ban here, they mean a Total Fire Ban.