Eucalyptus trees species were brought from Australia to the US in the mid 1800’s and presumably around that time to Arizona. The are common and ubiquitous in Tucson. The one in the photograph is in Agua Caliente Park and is a favorite of mine. It is a beautiful tree with great presence.
Eucalytus trees are biologically remarkable. Oil extracted from eucalyptus leaves and gum produced by the trees contains compounds that are powerful natural disinfectants and insect repellants, protecting the trees from insects, and also have medicinal qualities. The nectar from their flowers makes a fine honey. Because they are fast growers they are useful in the lumber industry and as landscape trees. However, in non-native habitats - and they are now found on all the continents - they can be destructive to native species as a competitor, in plantations they do not support native wildlife and when grown in places with high fire risk, such as California, they are a problem because they are highly flammable.
And in drought conditions they have been known to drop, not just leaves, but whole large branches. And are thought to be the origin for the the notorius “drop bears“. See here for more on Eucalyptus.
5 Comments
January 19, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Is it better, if so in what way/
Was it easy to change?
January 19, 2007 at 1:09 pm
I like it a lot better. The previous version was OK but this feels more spacious to me, cleaner. It was easy to change in most ways. WordPress allows you to change the template and keeps the content. Actually the best way I found to test run templates was to make up some posts and change the blog, run through templates of interest. Large photos can end up truncated or bleeding into the blogroll, etc. and I ran into a problem with confusion over posts vs pages.
I tried a lot of the templates and this one just clicked for me.
January 19, 2007 at 1:17 pm
I will add a PS. I wanted a template that allowed me to post larger photos, that didn’t have extraineous stuff built in like one with the girl outline or the various ones with flower motifs, that was fairly simple with text color that could either be changed or at least wasn’t a color I didn’t like (purple, reddish brown in two of the templates), that wasn’t fussy (lots of text boxes). I originally really liked Hemmingway but it has a title page - you get an initial page and you have to click on a link for the actual post to come up. So that’s how I got to this template.
Since you ask, is it unattractive?
January 20, 2007 at 10:49 am
But they DO have beautiful bark patterns and color variation…music to a watercolorist’s ears! ;) Nice blog too Louz! =)
January 21, 2007 at 2:15 am
Thanks Ame. I agree about the bark. I’m not a painter but that aspect really appeals to me. Makes a nice header too I think.
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