steve_sordy
Wedding Crasher
I am astonished it has survived! They are beautiful trees. Lovely bark that shreds like white parchment every year. The leaves are silver on one side and pale green on the other. They flower every year with lovely pale yellow nacelles hanging down. The wood is very hard, but rots surprisingly quickly. They are very fast growers in the right conditions. But vulnerable to the cold.The tree in this pic is a total mystery ..how the hell did it get here ..
A eucalyptus tree...on the edge of a harvested section in Kielder Forest ...there was even a Koala bear there as I approached...( ?skinchies..I made that last bit up ?)..everything else around it was Fir, Pine & a bit of Gorse & Hawthorn..
Spooky man .. View attachment 55967
My wife planted a tiny one so that she could have material for flower arranging. Her pruning had caused the tree that grew to have two main trunks. Years later we had a twin trunk tree that was 50' tall! It was a proper specimen and everyone that visited admired it. One trunk was almost two feet wide and the other over 15" diameter. Then one winter, 2010 I think, we had -17degC in the garden and that pretty much killed it. I paid a tree surgeon £600 to do what he could to save it. It appeared to be recovering but the following winter we had -11degC and that finished it off. It cost me £300 to have it felled and carted off. Very sad.