Blue Mountains with the Botanists

We had a very restful night at our Blue Mountain hide-away, The Waldorf.  After two days of being on the road by 7:30 it was luxurious to leave at 8am after a hot breakfast. 

Our first stop was a little walk through temperate rainforest near Mt. Wlison.  This was a short walk, but there were three interesting plants for me. (I think more for everyone else.).  Because of a recent wind storm, we saw some branches that had blown down from the canopy above, fairly recently.  They are doomed, now, unfortunately, but we could get a good look at how the orchids live on the branches of the host tree way up high where they also receive much more light than on the floor.  The next interesting  plant is called Tasmania , and it has crazy fruit that are very "primitivve" (ancestral is the correct term) where the style ends up outside of the fruit as it develops.  Finally, we saw a little fern called Tmesipteris.  It would be hard to find without someone pointing it out.  When I was in college, this little fern was thought not to be a fern, but something ancestral to all the vascular plants.  This little fern is very simple-- no true roots or leaves.  Since its DNA has been sequenced, it's true relationship to other ferns has been determined.  They are pictured above, and what you see are highly specialized stems serving as the photosynthetic surface AND as the root surface.  Through their evolution, they have lost their roots and leaves.  (Don't let this shake you, just think of snakes that are reptiles that have lost their limbs through evolutionary time).  They are growing on a tree fern stem.  This may not excite you, but look at just part of the crowd it drew.  I haven't drawn a crowd with that many cameras since I was halfway through my single digit birthdays!

Our next stop was further into the mountains.  To get there, we took a road with a name that begs explanation.  The name of the road is "Bells Line Of Road."  It looks like a mistake on the road sign, but it is a very deliberate name.  Bell was a surveyor who laid the road line, although the road was not built right away, for political reasons.  Folks were well aware of his road line, though, probably because it was so superior to the road that was in use, so when the road was eventually built, it was named Bells Line Of Road. 

At this stop we climbed part of the way up Mt Banks.  At least, the map names it as Mt Banks.  At the trailhead, the historic marker says "Mt Banks or Mt King George."  I am sticking with the Mt Banks name, in part because I am pretty sure this George was the one America fought a war against, and also because it was named Banks, after a famous botanist, by the explorer who climbed the mountain.  We had beautiful views from the near top.

And a close look at some tiny plants.

We drove to our lunch and afternoon spot after our descent.  This was the lovely Mount Tomah Botanic Gardens, part of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney.  Since Mount Tomah is in the Blue Mountains, it can host the cold climate collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens.  It is a new garden--really only about thirty years old, although you would never know that by walking amongst the beds.  It has a nice geographic arrangement as well, with a creek separating plants of the northern hemisphere from the southern.  We got to see Wollemi Pine, nearer to its wild home, in this gardern.  (There is a specimen growing in the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney.)  The Wollemi was thought to be extinct, but then found by some bushwalkers in the Blue Mountains about ten years ago.  Although there is a small cluster in the wild, its location a closely guarded secret.  Public, private and botanical gardens are its refuge.  It is a cool looking tree.  And, it has its own Facebook fan page.

Male cone.  The Wollemi has very soft needles.

The parking lot of the Mt. Tomah Botanic Gardens was our good-bye location, since some members of the trip didn't come directly back to Sydney.  We had a pretty quiet van ride back; I think passengers of all ages were thoughful and a bit tired.  Murray Henwood (University of Sydney) and Barry Ponns (Royal Botanic Garden) did an excellent job planning this trip, and especially exercising patience and high, good humor with the trip participants.  Believe me, telling a group of botanists that they have to ceasing looking at and photographing plants in order to get to the next stop, is quite a challenge.

We have a city day tomorrow.

A Vacation While on Vacation

We left almost everything in Sydney and departed the city at 7:45am for a Blue Mountains field trip.  Tonight we are sleeping in Leura, New South Wales, near one of the national parks that Australians are most proud of.  The point of a field trip when you are botanizing, is not the destination, but the journey. So, we made a series of stops.

The first stop was a couple of hours out of  Sydney along a road cut to an old quarry.  The quarry stone was used to build "the oldest sandstone bridge on the mainland."  This means there is an older one in Tasmania, and by my calculations, that makes this mainland bridge the second oldest bridge in Australia.  However, I don't want to offend anyone by not referring to it as "the oldest sandstone bridge on the mainland."

The interesting plant on this walk was an Astrotrichna that had two distinct forms even though they are a single species.  The forms had likely been separated for a long time, but came into contact with each other due to the disturbance of the road cut.  If you saw the plants in the forms, you would assume they were different species, and if Linnaeus had received the samples in the eighteenth century, he likely would have given them two names,  The modern definition of a species is based on the ability of members of a population to reproduction with each other.   The even more modern definition of a species is based on looking directly at the actual DNA.  By these definitions, the plants are all the same species, in spite of how they look.

Why is this interesting?  The diversity of life fascinating, whether you like flashy animals or subtler life forms like small plants or slime molds or beetles.  Remembering that Darwin's most famous book was called On the Origin of Species,  we realize that most of the time we consider why there are so many different species.  Finding an example of the opposite--looking different and actually being the same, is just an interesting.  It begins to tell a story of local adaptation and the amount of time and natural selection needed to make a population into more than one species.

While the botanists were looking at plants, JR and Alan explored a little more quickly and in a slightly wider range.  Alan found a skeleton.  Trevor, one of our accompanying botanists, and who has a wide knowledge of natural history in general, thought that it was a bush rat.

Our next stop was in the Blue Mountain National Park. The area had dwelling areas of the aborigines that were 20,000 years old. The area we wandered around felt like being above treeline in the northeast, but it wasn't. The vegetation type is refereed to as "heath." The exploring boys dropped out of site for a few minutes, and re-emerged to pull Mark and I out of the open and underneath a rock where the wind erosion had created a very striking honeycomb in the rock. The photo at the start of this entry is an example. Above is a wider view of the rock. With another short walk we came to a dwelling place that had some ancient symbols etched into the stone. This semi-circular symbol probably meant safe camping place.  These etchings were very hard to discern because they are subtle, and also because they are 20,000 years old.  It is humbling to look at them and think, "In my whole lifetime, will I every communicate anything, in any way, that will be looked at and understood 20,000 years from now?"  I don't expect to--in spite of this blog!

We stopped for lunch at a mountain tea room-- and had excellent sandwiches on very homemade tasting bread.  Alan ate three in the time it took most folks to consume their first.  His appetite has returned in force.

We've all been like kids on a family vacation these past two days.  We don't know a lot about where we are going ahead of our arrival, although we get a few timely clues along the way.  This doesn't matter too much since we sort of don't really know where we are anyway, and none of us visitors is driving.  Australia, New South Wales, is a big place.  So, we tamely climbed into the van after lunch, and exited at the next stop a few minutes later reading a sign that said "Scenic World."  Barry, the Royal Botanical Garden botanist who is driving our van told us we were going to take a little railroad ride, walk around and then come back in a sort of gondola skyway.  If you've been reading the blog, this sort of sounds like our day in Kuranda.

We quickly received our tickets, and loaded into a car.  Railway, I would suggest, is a very broad term, that mostly describes the tracks--not the car that sits on the tracks and certainly not the incline of the tracks.  We found ourselves sitting in fairly open cars, though with a cage top--and even I had very little head clearance.  As we move forward, the soundtrack from Raiders of the Lost Ark started to play.  We were plunged into utter darkness and pitched steeply forward.  We were on a railroad, but it was a railroad that had been used to take miners to the entry of the mine shaft.  In less than a minute we had descended about the length of six (US) football fields.

How would that be for a commute each morning?  The point of a field trip when you are botanizing, is not the destination, but the journey....

The bottom was very interesting too.  More tree ferns!  And, quite a lot of remnants of the mining and information about the history and culture of the mine.  (A 'random' example: boys started work at age 14.)  The boys and I had a long walk along the boardwalk, and ran into Trevor and a pair of lyrebirds that was fun to watch for a while.  They scratch at the leaf litter on the ground with a fierce concentration.  Meanwhile, a different species altogether, the scrubwren, followed in its tracks to glean whichever smaller invertebrate morsels had been left behind.  The male lyrebird we were watching also called to the female.  Lyrebirds are incredible mimics.  John Roy and I saw a tape of one at the Melbourne Museum that sounded like an ambulance, a chainsaw and a camera all in the space of a minute.  (This tape segment is part of David Attenborough's Life of Birds.) Today, the one we watched sounded more like a bird.

We did take a steep gondola ride back to the top, and it didn't have quite the thrill or the soundtrack of our descent, but it was scenic.  Then we were off to our next stop, a view of the famous rocks, The Three Sisters.  This area has rocky faces below a table, and the three rocks that remain were once a group of "Seven Sisters."  We had just enough time before dark fell to climb down and stand in the niche of the sister on the furthest left.

Standing in the shelter of a sister.

We've all had a splendid dinner with champagne and four wines.  It is getting quiet in our Blue Mountain hotel room.  Alan says his most vivid memory from today is finding the bones.  JR says his is the railroad ride.  Mark's most vivid memory is seeing the really tall tree ferns in the mining area.  All this, and we still have the journey back to Sydney tomorrow.