White Beech: The Rainforest Years (39 page)

Syzygium
is a myrtaceous genus, with shimmering paired leaves of forest green, and flowers in terminal cymes. Though
S. hodgkinsoniae
is supposed to need rich alluvial soil it seems happy enough at Natural Bridge on the montane basalt. It’s rare and listed as threatened, but at CCRRS there are hundreds of them. The ghost of Miss Hodgkinson is always with us, especially when the tree is in flower and the glades are full of its seductive scent. The man who named the plant for Miss H. was none other than Ferdinand Mueller. Needless to say he got the genus wrong: he thought it was a Eugenia, as did everyone else until Lawrie Johnson sorted out the Syzygiums by phylogenetic analysis in 1962. Till then the Syzygiums were called Acicalyptus, Acmena, Acmenosperma, Anetholea, Caryophyllus, Cleistocalyx, Jambosa, Lomastelma, Pillocalyx, Waterhousea, Xenodendron – and Eugenia. Not everyone has accepted Johnson’s revision, which has resulted in an enormous and rather too various genus. So the old synonyms are usually listed along with the Johnsonian name. Mueller published his
Eugenia hodgkinsoniae
in the
Victorian Naturalist
No. 8, in July 1891, but it seems that F. M. Bailey had already published the plant in the
Botany Bulletin
of the Queensland Department of Agriculture, as
Eugenia fitzgeraldii
, citing two isotypes, one collected on the summit of the Blackall Range in March 1891, the other at the Richmond River by R. D. Fitzgerald, and in the possession of ‘F. v. M.’ (APNI). Miss Hodgkinson could have lost her tiny claim to fame there and then but, incomprehensibly, she didn’t.

Mueller named another species after a Hodgkinson.
Hodgkinsonia ovatiflora
is named for his boss, Clement Hodgkinson, Deputy Surveyor General and later Assistant Commissioner and Secretary of the Board of Crown Lands and Survey. Although it may look very likely that the Hodgkinson who received the honour of having a Syzygium species named after her is one of Clement’s connections, it seems rather that it is not a Miss Hodgkinson whom we seek, but Mary, wife of James Hodgkinson, the first settler at Lennox Head, near the mouth of the Richmond River. Mary lived at North Creek from 1866 until her death in 1889 at the age of sixty-five. Contrariwise it may have been one of her five daughters, none of whom however has the initial M. The holotype of a lichenised fungus
Pseudocyphellaria glaucescens
(Lobariaceae) was collected by a ‘Miss Hodgkinson’ on the Richmond River in 1880 (
Flora of Australia
, 58:1, 62).

Louisa Atkinson collected for both William Woolls and Ferdinand Mueller. Mueller named a genus of mistletoe
Atkinsonia
after her, as well as two Asteraceous species and a species of fern. In 1869 at the age of thirty-five she married James Snowden Calvert, a survivor of Leichhardt’s expedition of 1844–5. Mueller then named two species for her,
Epacris calvertiana
and
Helichrysum calvertiana
. Sadly, she died not long after the birth of her first child in 1872.

With Mary Strong Clemens (
AD
B
) we find ourselves once again in the company of an amateur botanist. She was married to a chaplain in the US army; from 1905 to 1907, when her husband was serving in the Philippines, Mary made field trips to Luzon and Mindanao, collecting plants, apparently for Elmer Drew Merrill, USDA botanist in the Philippines. After her husband’s retirement from the ministry he assisted her. Between the wars the couple made collecting trips to China, Indo-China, North Borneo, Sarawak, Java and Singapore. In August 1935 they transferred their operations to New Guinea. When Mary’s husband died, five months after their arrival, she stayed on collecting in the New Guinea highlands until the Japanese invasion, when she was compulsorily repatriated to Queensland.

When Mrs Clemens arrived in Australia in December 1941 she was sixty-nine. She recommenced work at once, in a shed behind the Queensland Herbarium. At first she slept in the shed, but she was eventually persuaded to accept accommodation in a hostel. All day and as much of the night as she could, she spent pressing and labelling the plants she collected on her walk to work or on excursions by train, tram or bus. Her labels were based on identifications made by her colleagues at the Herbarium. These were not always correct but, with no formal training, she was in no position to question them. Some new species have been identified from specimens she collected, while information gained on her wanderings has increased the range of many known plants. The botanists she helped have generously remembered her in the naming of their species: the specific epithet ‘clemensiae’ is to be found on more than seventy species. However botany wouldn’t be botany if her biographer, R. F. N. Langdon of the Department of Botany at the University of Queensland, hadn’t decided to reduce her to size. His verdict is that ‘Mrs. Clemens probably lacked the capacity to determine plants. As years passed botanists became very wary of Mrs. Clemens and her plants.’ (380)

Bananas

The Australian writer Rosa Praed, who was born in 1851, spent her early childhood not far from Numinbah, at Bromelton on the Logan. She hardly noticed that her family was poor, because she had the riches of the rainforest.

. . . a huge Moreton Bay fig tree . . . gave us more delicious fruit than any we could get in the garden. Then there were mulgams – native raspberries peculiar to the Logan; and there was the chucky-chucky, a most pleasant tasting wild plum, which had a way of hanging tantalisingly over the water, so that if the pool were deep, there was a little difficulty in gathering it. The geebong was not so nice – its fruit was slimy and rather sickly, though not unpalatable . . . There is no end to the delights of a scrub.

Little Rosa was more easily pleased than today’s children, who would never dream of putting a mulgam or a chucky-chucky into their mouths. ‘Mulgam’ or, in his spelling, ‘malgum’, is listed by Gresty as the local Aboriginal name for the wild raspberry of the Numinbah Valley (Gresty, 62, 72). According to the Macquarie Dictionary the chucky-chucky is usually the fruit of the American snowberry, or the Tasmanian Gaultheria. Praed’s ‘geebong’ is nowdays better known as ‘geebung’, a name given to various Persoonia species. In Western Australia and South Australia geebungs are known also as ‘Snottygobbles’.

In the Cave Creek rainforest at all times of the year there is fruit. Sometimes there is so much squishy fruit underfoot that you find yourself walking in jam. Most prodigal are the figs, being in fruit all the year round. The botany of figs is still in its infancy, which is the kindest way of saying that the botanists have signally failed to answer any of the big questions about figs. What we think of as the fruit of a fig is actually a hollow structure called a synconium, like an inside-out umbel, containing hundreds of male pollen-bearing and/or female seed-forming flowers. In about half the 800–1,000 fig species in the world the fig contains flowers of both sexes; in the other half the synconia are unisexual. All fig species breed their own pollinators, tiny symbiotic wasps, inside the synconia; the adult wasps travel from fig to fig through the tiny hole at the bottom, carrying pollen from the male synconia to the female, or from one bisexual synconium to another. Some synconia will be visited by more than one species of fig wasp, and some of the wasps are cuckoo-wasps that live on the flesh of the synconium, or the seeds or the wasp larvae in it.

The entomologists have performed marvels in studying the complex interaction between fruit and insect. Unfortunately the botanists are still in total disarray when it comes to the systematics of fig species. None of the botanists who have visited Cave Creek can establish how many species of figs grow there, or just which species they are. Dearest to my heart, and the easiest to identify, are our sandpaper figs, called that because their leaves, abrasive as glass paper, were used by the Aborigines for smoothing off spears. There are supposed to be two species of these:
Ficus fraseri
which grows on the drier slopes, and
F. coronata
which grows on the creeks, in rainforest and in open country from far eastern Victoria as far north as Mackay. In our rainforest some
F. coronata
produce swarming clusters of fruit on the trunk (cauliflory) and branches (ramiflory) as well as in the leaf axils. The species name
coronata
refers to the crown of rather stiff silvery bristles at the tip of the fruit, which ripens to a rich purple if the birds will let it. Though usually these trees are smallish and fairly shapeless, a few put out beautifully regular branches with fruit in every leaf axil. Breeding from these could result in a very handsome garden cultivar.
F. fraseri
, which has a much more restricted range, grows into a full-sized forest tree which bears copious hairless fruits that ripen from orange to red. Both trees are favourites of the Figbirds, who wear natty suits of olive green and big red sunglasses.

Neither of our sandpaper figs is a strangler; all our other figs are. The existence of strangler figs is one of the first phenomena that suggest to the amateur dendrologist that the much-vaunted equilibrium of the rainforest is actually a state of constant war, in which no side can be allowed to win. Of the billions of seeds produced by each of our huge fig trees, only those will germinate that have been dropped in a fork of another tree, usually by a defecating bird or bat. The seedling lives at first as an epiphyte, but soon sends long slender roots in search of the ground. Once it has tapped into the available nutrients, the root grows stouter, and sends out side roots that link all around the host tree. These grow thicker, and contract, till they gradually strangle the host tree, which is already suffering because the stiff, dark foliage of the fig topping out over its own canopy is shading it out. The host tree dies, and rots away inside, leaving a massive crown of fig leaves atop a tall hollow tower pierced by many gothic windows, where the Boobook likes to sit and watch for prey.

All up and down the east coast of New South Wales and southern Queensland you may see huge strangler figs standing all alone in otherwise cleared paddocks, the only survivors of the vanished rainforest population. Just why the figs should survive is not immediately clear. It helps that no particular use has ever been found for fig timber, which is soft, light and perishable. In the memoir of Numinbah Valley compiled by public-minded denizens to mark the bicentenary of the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 may be seen a reproduction of a charcoal drawing by Tom McGeown of the trunk and spreading buttresses of a giant fig tree. The caption reads:

The Memorial Fig Tree – a tribute to Marion Yaun from her sons . . . It stands like an island of vegetation in the cleared paddock, the long sinuous roots snaking up the hill as if holding it together. It is dark and cool beneath its massive branches – a sanctuary for animal life, bird life and humans alike. Often did Marion stand on her verandah and remark at the beauty of that tree, and when her grown sons came to clear the vegetation round it for their growing dairy herds, they remembered their mother’s words and could not destroy it. For us today it is a reminder of the height of the forest canopy that once covered the river flats and no doubt Marion would be pleased to know that the fig is still growing and giving pleasure so many years into the future. (Hall
et al.
, 23)

Given the extraordinary number of lone survivor fig trees in Australian pastureland thousands of other farmers’ wives must have had the same idea as Marion Yaun. The giant dome of fig foliage can provide a haven for plants as well as animals and birds. If there are no cattle in the surrounding paddock, the area shaded by a fig tree will become an oasis of amazingly varied regrowth, because fruit-eating birds have nowhere else to perch, and, wherever they perch, they defecate. A lot of what germinates will be exotic fruit species, guavas, persimmons, loquats, mulberries, grenadillas, passionfruit and goodness knows what next.

The names suggested for our strangler fig trees begin with
Ficus macrophylla
, the Moreton Bay Fig,
F. obliqua
, the Small-leaved Fig,
F. superba
,
F. superba
var.
henneana
,
F. rubiginosa
,
F. watkinsiana
and even
F. virens
. The chief candidate for the
macrophylla
ID is a huge fig growing in what was pasture. It seems near enough to the commonly accepted type, although its leaves are hardly big enough. The dusting of rust on the underside may indicate kinship with
F. rubiginosa
. All of our figs seem to be intermediate species, which makes nonsense of the taxonomy, you would think.

F. superba
, found at the Endeavour River in 1770, is the first Australian fig to be collected, although not identified until 1866 by Friedrich Anton Wilhelm Miquel; the finished painting based on the drawing made by Sydney Parkinson at the time of collection clearly shows fruit with whitish polka dots. We have a fig that produces similar dark purple fruit with yellowish spots, but it isn’t deciduous, as
F. superba
is supposed to be. None of the common names of this fig, ‘cedar fig’ or ‘white fig’ or ‘sour fig’ or ‘mountain fig’, seems to fit ours.
Ficus superba
is not only extremely variable but widely distributed around the Pacific; one lot of botanists, led by O. K. Berg and E. J. H. Corner, have now excluded the Australian
superba
-type figs from the Asian species and elevated the
henneana
variety or subspecies to full speciesdom as Maiden did before them but, as the type comes from islands in the Torres Strait, it seems unlikely that our figs could be identical. Bailey had tried to establish the Australian species as
F. gracilipes
, Hiern as
F. parkinsonii
, and Warburg as
F. pritzelli
, and at one point Corner suggested
F. superba
var.
muelleri
, all of which is as nothing compared with the nomenclatural uproar surrounding other fig species. There has even been an attempt to split the Linnaean genus and add a subgenus
Urostigma
, to which the Australian figs would belong.