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Michael Prince
Joined: Sat Jun 04, 2016 12:08 pm Posts: 573 Location: Perth Australia
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120-year-old trees
I thought some of you - particularly those of you into palms - might be interested in seeing some of the older trees at the local zoo here. I find the place a bit naff these days really (it's a small, inner-city zoo and a bit limited), but as it was opened in 1898, there are plenty of very large trees still around. I'm not sure how many of these were planted right then, but there are quite a few trees there that are obviously very old...there are several Jubaea chilensis that were planted in 1912 apparently, but I forget to get photos of them...
I doubt these Syagrus (in the background) are original, but they're clearly older than many of the ones you see around Perth - they were often planted in the 80s when they became widely available...
This lake is pretty old, as are the canariensis:
Round to the left...
A well-controlled clump of reclinata...
Round to the right...
I love washingtonias when they get this old (there's a humanoid down below for a size comparison)...
It's hard to get a decent shot from inside the clump...
Growing amongst them are some pretty tall Hymenosporum flavum (native frangipanis - spot the tree kangaroos)...
On one of the islands in the lake there's an enormous Auracaria bidwillii (Bunya pine) that a couple of gibbons live on - it's bigger than it looks in this photo:
Not sure what this Auracaria is...maybe another bidwillii...the original trees used to have plaques on them but they seem to have slowly dropped off over the years and not been replaced. The thing to the left is huge, and maybe a Toona ciliata...not sure...
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Sun Dec 06, 2020 12:26 pm |
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Andy Martin
Joined: Thu Apr 24, 2008 8:58 pm Posts: 1279 Location: Oxford UK
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Re: 120-year-old trees
Thanks for showing the pics Michael. What are the discs used for circulating the trunks of the phoenix palms in pic 2? presumably to stop some animal access to the top? I check Aussie temperatures every day and have noted that Perth has had a fairly cool Spring this year. Would you agree and if so what has been the reason?
_________________ Lover of Yuccas,Palms,Nolinas,Schefflera.
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Sun Dec 06, 2020 2:42 pm |
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Michael Prince
Joined: Sat Jun 04, 2016 12:08 pm Posts: 573 Location: Perth Australia
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Re: 120-year-old trees
There was a wild population of Indian palm squirrels at the zoo for ages. When I was a kid, they'd be running up and down all the palm trees, and had spread out into the rest of the area (sort of). The zoo is in South Perth, which is on a peninsula between two wide parts of the river, so they were partially contained, and I remember being told when I was a guide at the zoo that cats took them out if they strayed too far from the zoo. Mind you, I lived in that area on two separate occasions and saw one once, so they were never a problem. So the bands on the trees were there to keep them out of the canopies, probably to make it harder for them to breed. Apparently they've since tried to eradicate them, which I find a bit sad...I don't remember seeing one there for years.
Yes it's been really very cool. The funny thing is, November was, averaged out, Australia's hottest on record; whenever this kind of thing happens (and it has periodically over the last few years - 'hottest spring', 'driest winter' etc), the south-west seems to be the exception. So it was Australia's driest November - but Perth's wettest on record (four times the mean). I saw on a weather website a while ago a story about the antarctic polar vortex - apparently there was a huge mass of cold air swirling around the south pole during spring, and it was the biggest and strongest vortex this late in the season on record, and it was obviously spinning cooler air and moisture up our way. Despite official temperature records etc, it just feels different...there was the odd hot day in November, but either side of them it was just cool. It'd get up to 23 and then by lunchtime the seabreeze would sweep in and it'd feel anything but warm, day after day....and the first morning of December got down to 6.something - coldest summer morning on record. And people still say 'well, it's been a warm November' - thank god someone keeps records. Now it's about to get hot, of course - 39 tomorrow - but it'll be interesting to see if the warmth stays or if we drop back down to the low-to-mid 20s...a couple of summers ago, this is what happened most of the time. The normal summer weather pattern is highs moving in from the west till they settle in the Great Australian Bite, and they spin hot air from the north-east down over Perth. A trough then forms just off the coast and drags very hot air over Perth, till it gets bumped inland and you go into a humid cooler change, till the next high. That summer there were hardly any highs sitting in the Bite at all, and the weather was much more like Melbourne. Ugh.
Are you looking forward to a snowy Christmas in Oxford?
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Mon Dec 07, 2020 1:25 am |
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Andy Martin
Joined: Thu Apr 24, 2008 8:58 pm Posts: 1279 Location: Oxford UK
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Re: 120-year-old trees
Michael... we rarely get snow at Christmas time. The last time was 2010 when the Arctic paid us a visit, liked it so much it stayed for month. This autumn has been the mildest with only -1C recorded so far.
_________________ Lover of Yuccas,Palms,Nolinas,Schefflera.
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Mon Dec 07, 2020 5:07 pm |
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Michael Prince
Joined: Sat Jun 04, 2016 12:08 pm Posts: 573 Location: Perth Australia
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Re: 120-year-old trees
Well...you've got two weeks, so I think you should all try a bit harder this year. It's very romantic from our point of view...and it's going to be 40 here today, which only exacerbates the fantasy. Mind you, the two winters I spent in Europe (in northern Germany, a long time ago) were just cold, gray and miserable, so I know it's rare...but here's hoping!
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Tue Dec 08, 2020 12:53 am |
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Martinnicklin
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2012 9:06 pm Posts: 2675 Location: Telford UK
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Re: 120-year-old trees
I am 53 and never known a white Christmas. Once had a white Boxing Day - deep enough to be snowed in - that was during my childhood! Some lovely plants at the zoo there, as indeed there are at zoos here (after all, the gardens were an important part of the experience). Some lovely exotic plants down in the zoological gardens down south in the UK but even up here I recall a few years ago being very impressed with some of the great plantings at Chester Zoo, including a magnificent Desfontainea in full bloom. It prompted me to get one which promptly died in 2010! I think they had planted the area outside the magnificent jaguar enclosure with some lovely South American plants. There are also some beautiful tropical plants in the tropical enclosures and a great cactus collection. Worth a visit just for the plants.
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Tue Dec 08, 2020 3:07 pm |
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