Mallee

[ticklingmedusa]

Here in California I bought some really nice imported burl a dealer had labeled as Mallee. Its a gorgeous natural edge bowl blank, yellow orange with lots of swirls.
Its hard and dense and I can tell already it will take several trips to the
grinder before it yields to my gouge.
My question is does mallee mean its a Eucalypt in general or a specific
tree?
Decades ago I took a landscape tree identification course and we learned
a small tree named Kruse's Mallee or Eucalyptus kruseana, which had silver-grey, roundish leaves. The botany book I carried at the time had mallee in the glossary and defined it as a thicket.
I'm wondering if its the same species.
I've probably opened another can of worms but I'm a curious seppo.
Thanks for your responses.
tm

[ozwinner]

Hi.

A Mallee is a many stemmed tree, the stems all originate from a type of root ball, ie, the Mallee root.
Great fire wood, they sell truck loads of it, shame to burn it, isnt it? :-

Sorry, forgot to add that it is a Euc and very slow growing hence the hardness.

Al :)

[rsser]

Yeah, could be brown mallee. Mallee's a region of SE Australia which lends its name to these timbers. Can have great bird's-eye figure. Lovely stuff and forgiving to turn.

btw ... How's the workshop working for you TM?

[Big Shed]

Mallee as a botanical species occurs in WA as well as SE Australia.

I come from Adelaide and we used mallee roots as firewood, great stuff.

We also camped SE of Lameroo in SA a lot and used mallee roots from land clearing in the area for our camp fires. Did a lot of nature photography there, especially bats.

There is an interesting article on mallee here:

http://www.anbg.gov.au/education/pdfs/mallee-2002.pdf

[Salty]

We have the "Pokolbin mallee" Eucalyptus pumila in the Hunter too.:U Rare as rocking horse poo now and limited to small areas on the Brokenback ranges. Listed as "vulnerable":o
See http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/sprat/public/publicspecies.pl?taxon_id=16510