He had been admiring it for 30 years.
A red gum burl is a remarkable thing — a huge lump on an old tree that grows as the tree grows.
In Europe and the UK, the Boss says they call them burrs. When harvested, cut and polished, they were a feature of the walnut dashboard of a Jaguar car.
The arborists say a burl is caused by some sort of attack or injury — disease caused by bacteria, fungi or viruses with a mould infestation. It might be insects or a fungus or a branch being blown off — and the tree repairs itself to keep going.
Environmental stress such as fire or flood or drought — or physical trauma from insect damage, wounds from animals or injuries from logging or a combination — can also cause it.
There are some trees, with eucalypts being one of them, that are genetically predisposed to form burls. Our river red gums form them often, and The Boss has seen some fine examples — there are plenty around Barmah, with a few splendid specimens along the Budgee Creek.
He says they are some of the oldest red gums you’ll ever see, because they were too gnarled and twisted for the loggers to deal with and they left them to grow. The really old trees have nooks and hollows where the feather gliders can hide during the day and the parrots nest at night.
For the same reason, the loggers left this massive one, which happens to be on my stretch of the river; I’ve sniffed around it many times on my morning walks. It hung handsomely, about half-way up the tree. It looked so big it might tip the whole tree over.
Except it’s now sitting on the ground because some fellers snuck in during the night and cut the tree down.
The Boss thinks they used a battery-powered chainsaw, because the old tree — he says it was well over a century old — is only 300 metres from a neighbour’s house, but nobody heard anything.
As you can see, the tree was close to the river, performing another essential role in stabilising the bank, as well as being a remarkable sight for people enjoying the bush.
The blokes who cut it down also left most of the timber behind. The Boss says if they had any brains they might have thought about why the loggers let it be, a hundred years ago.
But they didn’t have any brains and they destroyed something unique and irreplaceable. It would be good if they were caught, like the rascal at Reedy Lake recently, who came back in the dark for a load after being caught earlier in the day.
The second time he lost his trailer, chainsaw and wood — and should cop a hefty fine. I hope so. Woof!
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