White Beech: The Rainforest Years Read Online Free Page A

reported in 1999:
     
    After thirty-five years of annual surveys on 4 hectares of rain forests in Australia, the seedling teams have found a large variability in the patterns of seed rain, seedling germination and growth of tropical trees. Mast seeding, annual seed production, and intermittent seed rain triggered by environmental conditions such as seasonal rains or high light were all successful patterns utilized by neighbouring species. Some adult trees never flowered or fruited during the thirty-five years of observations.
     
    Among these last Lowman listed the Rose Marara, Pseudoweinmannia lachnocarpa . ‘We hypothesized that these species typically flowered infrequently – perhaps every fifty years or more – or that subtle climatic changes had led to their sterility. Only patient observations will yield these secrets of the great forest floor lottery’ (Lowman, 102). At Cave Creek in August, the last month of the Australian winter, Rose Mararas can be seen in cloudy white bloom up and down the forest slopes. The fruit ripens slowly and doesn’t begin to drift to earth till steamy February. It is not every year that the spent blossom ripens to shed clouds of fine seeds clad in brown fluff, that float down through the forest to settle on every moss-covered rock and drift into every crevice. We collect the seed by the bucketful and dump it in trays. Stout little seedlings appear in due course. It may be that the trees that were the subject of the study in which Lowman was involved were growing outside their range, and therefore lacked the stimulus to flower, which might indeed be the consequence of accelerated climate change. Lowman was working with the famed Joseph H. Connell, distinguished professor of zoology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1963 Connell set up a long-term observation in which transects were marked across two Australian rainforest plots; along these every tree, sapling or seedling had to be identified, counted, marked and mapped, to document how succession actually worked. Over the years a procession of distinguished American biologists has visited Australia to work on the Connell project. If any of them had wandered further afield than their two plots, or even consulted the odd Australian dendrologist, other possibilities might have occurred to them.
    The name White Beech could refer to any one of half-a-dozen subtropical tree species (Munir). It is used for any of five Australian tree species, Gmelina leichhardtii , G. dalrympleana , G. fasciculiflora , G. schlechteri and one member of a totally different genus, Elaeocarpus kirtonii . G. fasciculiflora is native to Cairns and the Atherton Tableland, and G. dalrympleana (sometimes called G. macrophylla ), with leaves twenty-five centimetres long and reddish-pink fruits, grows in northern Australia and Papua New Guinea, where G. schlechteri is also to be found. Further north still, in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, the name White Beech is given to yet another Gmelina, G. moluccana . Far away in the rainforest of Martinique Symplocos martinicensis is also called White Beech. Seven of the thirty-five species in the genus Gmelina are native to China, the rest to other parts of Asia, New Guinea and Australia.
    The White Beech this book is named after is Gmelina leichhardtii . This is a stupendous tree, growing to forty metres in height, with a straight cylindrical trunk, only slightly flanged at the base, just asking to be cut down, slabbed up and shipped off, which is what had already happened to most White Beeches by the beginning of the twentieth century. To my anglophone sensibility the misleading imprecision of the name ‘White Beech’ conveys something of the mystery that veils my whole crackbrained enterprise, something of the riddle of the rainforest.
    Forests are not just bunches of trees. Supposing you plant a few hundred trees on an acre of ground, for a few years they will grow on side by side like a plantation,