Thread: Another "what sort of timber is this" request.

My first thought looking at the whorled leaves was a Pittosporum, but the flowers don't look right. The log isn't very helpful, I'm afraid, there are many small trees with similar bark. Your best bet would be to take that branch to a herbarium, if there's one conveniently close to you. An alternative is to get a list of native & introduced species for your area & work through them, comparing foliage & flowers 'till you get a match. Someone well-versed in botany can usually make a few informed guesses & zero in quickly, but for us lay folk it can be a tedious process (damhik!).....

Cheers,

Thanks Ian, I scanned the leaves and forwarded it to my son up in Belingen who knows someone who knows about these things (It's not what you know etc.etc.) so I will wait and see. You are right about the bark, there are many possibilities and as for the leaves, well, there were few left once the water receded. But even after all the turmoil, there are still trees standing, just not anywhere near as many as there were and in another 50 years things will be back to what they were.

Not a lot to go on, but the new tip and the mottled bark suggest it is Viburnum odoratissimum. There is also a selection called Emerald Lustre for its bright green leaves. Could be this variant, hard to tell.
I propagated a few thousand of these two varieties a couple of weeks back and that soft new tip growth became a bit familiar.

Thanks Wizened, this thing was probably 15M tall and 300+ mm through the trunk. It struck me as some sort of Fig but even some experts are scratching their heads. I wouldn't like one in a suburban garden! When we get to clearing the fence line I might just grab some and see how it dries.

Take size claims of nursery plants with a grain of salt.
We have let some of our mother stock of these get out of hand, and cut these back recently. They were 30+ years old , multi-trunked (having been cut many times), many trunks were 250mm and 10+ m tall

Thanks Wizened, I got the idea that plant descriptions were a "guide" but sometimes things do a bit wrong. I just never imagined I'd see some growing on the river bank. But then there is a Bunya Pine and some really nice Bamboo as well. I'll tag it as "Viburnum" then. Thanks for solving that problem.

Trees grow big up your way Old Hilly, here's a photo of my grandfather, with my mum & one of her brothers, bringing home a small twig. He & his brother had a sawmill & lived up near where Pappinbarra river crosses Pappinbarra Left Arm Rd. The photo was taken around 1940.
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This was the abandoned family home when we went up there in the mid 1960's. When I was up there a few years ago, there was a large green colourbond shed there.
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Well that is a reasonable log, that is for certain. Old Joe Patrick's bridge on the Right Arm got washed away in the recent floods and people were "isolated" for a few weeks. I somehow don't think that would have worried your Grandfather one little bit, he would have just followed a ridge line and found a way around the problem. Colourbond sheds are like mushrooms, they seem to pop up everywhere these days. Thanks for the photos, another bit of history.
I really should drink more tea before trying to recall what happened beyond last week. Old Joe's bridge was burned in the fires of 2019/20, it was the bridge at the Junction that got washed away just recently. Some of the older locals built "flying foxes" to get goods across the river. Your Grandfather would have felt right at home.