Big tree enthusiast Yoav Daniel Bar-Ness is fascinated by Hobart’s landmark trees and wants to share his knowledge and enthusiasm for our forest giants with the world.
The Styx Valley. The Florentine. Tyenna Big Tree Reserve. Tahune Airwalk.
These places draw people who want to see Earth’s great and mighty trees. They travel to these sites from Hobart, other parts of Tasmania, Australia and the world.
And yet right here in Hobart we have trees just as inspiring. They reach to the sky from Waterworks Reserve, the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington, Knocklofty Reserve and the Queens Domain.
And all of them have stories to tell for environmental scientist Yoav Daniel Bar-Ness, who has been fascinated by big trees since first seeing the California coastal redwoods as a kid in San Francisco.
When Yoav looks at a big tree he sees stories of the landscape and people stretching back hundreds, if not tens of thousands of years.
And when he takes people to meet Hobart’s forest giants he unlocks a world most of us take for granted.
Down by the water
Yoav likes to start his tour of Hobart’s landmark trees with a short drive from the city to Waterworks Reserve. And there it is, at the end of the car park, a stringybark of giant girth and with a massive, muscular root snaking its way along the car park edge.
“This giant tree is an individual,” says Yoav. “It’s got its own life story. And because trees grow in relatively predictable ways, if we know a little bit about stringybarks, we can try and figure out a little bit about its backstory.”
Fire tree
We walk a couple of hundred metres along the walking track towards Gentle Annie Falls before Yoav stops again. Just below sandstone cliffs stand two more stringybarks.
If you stop and look you can see signs of past fires.
“We can use those signals of past fire to give us a start in understanding some of the history of this particular place,” says Yoav.
“The tree right next to me, this stringybark, has clearly survived a fire, as indicated by the black marks on its base.”
If you look up the tree has only a few branches on it. Yoav thinks it is being dominated by the much larger stringybark behind it.
“It’s the suppressed trees that have the interesting gnarly bits, the signs of decay where biodiversity and wildlife likes to live,” he says.
“They also have more charisma because they have a more difficult and challenging story to tell.”
Big blue
We walk back out towards the reserve’s historic Receiving House, which once channelled water from the mountain into the nearby reservoirs.
In front of it, its leaves and branches reaching towards the upper reservoir, is a blue gum that stops us in our tracks.
“This is a beautiful, beautiful Tasmanian blue gum,” says Yoav.
Eucalyptus globulus is one of the biggest and tallest trees on the planet, and Tasmania’s state floral emblem.
Yoav studies the tree. Although it’s gigantic, it’s not a forest relic.
“My hunch is this blue gum naturally sprouted after they built the waterworks here in the 1840s or 1850s, and the open skies and proximity to water have allowed it to reach a phenomenal size.
“The local wildlife has created a natural grazing lawn beneath the blue gum, and they are chomping on any new saplings, reducing natural competition that could take resources away from this giant tree.”
We look closer at ‘big blue’. It is so healthy its branches are as wide in girth as the trunks of other fully grown trees nearby.
“Look at that mega branch,” says Yoav. “It forms a large outstretched arm and you can see compression ripples on its lower surface.
“The tree and branch are both growing and expanding at the same rate evenly, and where they meet you get these fascinating and beautiful compressions, like waves of wood underneath the branch.”
Witness tree
We drive out of Waterworks Reserve and turn right towards Ridgeway. Within a couple of hundred metres Yoav pulls into a ditch on the side of the road.
In front of us, perched on top of a ledge carved from the dirt stands an old, gnarly stringybark. Yoav calls it a witness tree.
“A witness tree has observed something happening in history, survived it and has a story to tell,” he says.
“My hunch is this is a veteran tree pre-dating European clearing of the land, and is very much a product of Aboriginal fire management from earlier times.
“You can see it’s survived a recent fire that hollowed it out at the bottom and there have definitely been lots of vehicles that have pulled up onto this clearing and scraped away the soil.
“When I look at this tree, I see it as a witness to the changes in caring for country that have happened since European colonisation.
“This is possibly one of the easiest to access, most interesting dry land stringybark veteran trees I’ve ever seen.
“People pass it every day and never stop to take a look but I think this is truly a bit of natural heritage. More experienced eyes than mine could look at it and see other links back to Aboriginal land management.”
Fossil Grove
We are standing in a gully at the start of Main Fire Trail where it meets Strickland Avenue.
Clearly Yoav has saved the best of his grand tour for last. And like the other forest giants, these two are in plain sight.
Two tall trees, sentinels of the forest, stand in front of us on either side of the gully.
The first, Fossil Giant, is named for the geological layer on which it sits. Almost every rock you turn over has etchings of ancient marine fossils frozen in time.
“This is the Fossil Grove, and this is the Fossil Giant,” says Yoav.
“It is a Eucalyptus obliqua, known to Tasmanians as stringybark or to the Victorians as a messmate.
“And this is really one of the biggest trees this low down left on the mountain.
“It took us two minutes to walk in here from the road. It’s in Wellington Park, and I think this Fossil Grove is really one of the best places to introduce citizens and students and visitors to Hobart’s amazing giant trees.”
The second tall tree in Fossil Grove stares back at us from across the gully. It is a veteran blue gum but unlike the blue gum in Waterworks Reserve that has been blessed with ideal growing conditions, this one has had a hard life, its story writ large across exposed roots, branches and a hollowed out base, large enough for a person to walk through.
“Most of Hobart’s ancient blue gums have made way for farmland, housing and to build the city, and yet here, somehow, we have this ancient surviving veteran, one of the last surviving veteran blue gums this low down on kunanyi / Mt Wellington.
“Look at it. It’s weird and complicated, and I don’t know of any other blue gum this low down on the mountain that has such a huge, hollow base.
“The branch structure is twisted and gnarly. It is clearly a survivor of several fire events and it has an incredible story to tell if you take a moment to listen.”
Big trees in our own backyard
“We’re really lucky in Hobart because we have so many big trees in our backyard, literally within sight of the city,” says Yoav.
“We’ve got different forest types that are found nowhere else in the world. We’ve got examples of some of the very largest and tallest trees in the world, and it’s just right here waiting to be visited.”
