We drove up for our 6th wedding anniversary in our new old Hyundai! It went really well.
The day was cold and wet. We had snow, rain and sunshine; a typical Tasmanian day. Hardly any tourists, mostly locals.
The tree is the Deciduous Beech Nothofagus gunnii. It's the only deciduous native tree in Tasmania and it's rather rare.
Nothofagus is one of the oldest genera of flowering plants in the world with a fossil record stretching back 80 million years. It's regarded by scientists as one of the keys to understanding how vegetation evolved and migrated throughout the southern hemisphere.
The Tasmanian Deciduous Beech grows in dense stands, but even in autumn colours it's not that easy to find. The beech is mainly restricted to high rainfall areas in the central and western mountains of Tasmania, with a few minor populations on some of the southern mountains. The name Nothofagus comes from the Latin 'nothus' meaning false and 'fagus' meaning beech. (The 'gunnii' is after Ronald Campbell Gunn who collected the first specimens on Mt Olympus).
We also saw some massive mushrooms! Fortunately we had packed a good lunch, and could leave them for others to see.
The Deciduous Beech is a direct link back to the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana. Fossil records found at Cethana in northern Tasmania date back 35 million years to the early Oligocene period.
Read more <here>.
See the slideshow of our pictures by clicking on the picture below!
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| Turning Nothofagus |
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