My Year with Bluestone: Gleditsia Triacanthos

Perhaps there will be a chapter in my bluestone book that might be a little photo-essay about all the things that fall on or sit on top of bluestone: mostly plants, leaves, flowers, blossoms, but also sand, gravel, rubbish and sometimes rain and hail.

I took this photo today, walking home a different way. (I also fantasise about whether it would be possible to walk to work just walking on bluestone laneways.)

They are seed pods of gleditsia triacanthos. In autumn, lines of these trees light up the streets around here with luminous yellow leaves. It's a North American tree, introduced into Australia in the middle of the nineteenth century. The trees produce these long pods in the first few years of their lives. They are supposed to fall into water, but here they have fallen into a bluestone laneway, garnishes with yellow fragments. The asymmetry of nature and this lavish effusion of seed pods like giant caterpillars onto the beloved geometry of stones

My Year with Bluestone: Human Scale

Just as my friends now sometimes tell me about their own bluestone encounters  — send pictures! send paragraphs! send blogposts! — I am now also noticing different stones, and different dimensions of stones. As this very mild summer comes to an end here, shadows were long as I walked home last night and it was around 6.30 when I came to the roundabout where three streets in Fitzroy intersect. The central plantation is an irregular oval shape, but its bluestone edges give it aesthetic unity. But really, the central focus today is on these beautiful trees: eucalyptus citriodora, or lemon-scented gum trees. Their scent is best experienced after rain, but you can crush the leaves and get a whiff of the lemony oil.

I deliberately took a photo with my own shadow extending before me, wanting to catch a sense of the early evening light, and the light and shade of these trees: their white bark (the ones in our own garden also peel off their outer bark in early summer); and their lush growth (the summer has been so mild that the eucalypts have stayed bright green and the deciduous trees have only just now started to curl and dry). The cyclist is also a nice Fitzroy touch. In the background you can see the edge of the Edinburgh gardens (bowls club, tennis club, cricket/footy ground).

It's a lovely quiet spot and the atmospherics of early evening were just gorgeous. There's not much traffic at this point, even though it was peak hour. A few people having quiet drinks outside the pub, which I include here because its first level is made of sandstone, much better for reflecting light than bluestone. The scene is made of very familiar, but very beautiful things: local stone, local trees, local streets. I was going home.

The mortality of elm trees

I don't know if we'd plant them now, in this era of climate change and the move away from European "exotic" plantings, but in the front of our house, there are several "stands" of elm trees. They are probably over a hundred years old. Like other elms in Melbourne, they are part of an ageing population. They also have regular infestations of elm-leaf beetle, and so every few years we have them injected with stuff that kills the beetles. Last year we left it rather late, and so by midsummer, when the air was burning, our normally dark green canopy was riddled with lacy holes in the desiccated leaves. It was a sad and grim sight, but we trusted that the next season, our trees would recover.



(Not my photo, but this is what the leaves looked like.)

This week I've seen elms elsewhere in Melbourne coming into bright green leaf, while ours remain bare. They normally produce millions of flaky dry seeds that fall all over the car and the roof and the paths. We were starting to fear our trees would not make it; that somehow the drought and the extreme temperatures of last summer and the beetles might have combined to bring about their end. It was dreadful to contemplate: presiding over the death of these magnificent creatures. The house itself was starting to feel denuded; the bare trunks and branches a sign of our shame.

You can tell from the tenses in that paragraph that I haven't given up all hope yet. Today was warm and beautiful, and I can now see little buds and tiny flashes of delicate green leaves. Don't know what's happened to the seeds, but it looks as if our beautiful trees might be ok.

This is not my photo either, and not our trees, but this picture shows you how beautifully these trees sit in Melbourne's European style parks. Read about Melbourne's elms here.