Tag: Leu Gardens

Leaf of the day: Roots and Pandan Mats

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These are the root sketches from yesterday, the Snakewood again, the Screwpine Pandanus utilius, and some Strangler Fig roots.
Having done some quick research today on the Screwpine I see that the tree at Leu is just a small one with very modest stilt roots. It also seems that it will have spectacular “edible” fruit,
and its leaves are used for weaving beautiful mats and baskets in India and Indonesia.
One curious little tradition from North Maluku in Indonesia requires a woman to be able to weave screwpine leaves before getting married, as she will not only weave a marital outfit, but also give the groom 3 screwpine mats in acceptance of his proposal.

Here are some “pandan” mats from Farls blog “Photojourneys” here. His photos of the Phillipines are beautiful, it makes me want to get a plane ticket and go! He writes, The Philippines claims to produce the handsomest mats in Asia and arguably the most colorful and intricate fine-grained mats are handwoven by the Samal tribe of Tawi-Tawi.
These lovely mats are, at their most expensive about $20.

The following is an extract from from an article in “The Courier” Unesco’s online newsletter,(here) about one of the best traditional weavers in the Phillipines, Haja Amina Appi.

“Mat weaver Haja Amina Appi walks with a strong stride that betrays her 80 years. She is off to harvest leaves from the pandan trees that grow behind her home in Ungos Matata, in the province of Tawi Tawi, a small island in the southwestern tip of the Philippines.

The bulky leaves are thorny-edged, but she prefers this variety because it produces strong and sturdy matting strips. She has become accustomed to the prickly thorns after years of working with them to produce the raw materials of her art. Throughout her life she has been a mat weaver, teacher, artist, and most recently, a National Living Treasure or Gawad sa Manlilika ng Bayan Awardee. A mat can take up to two months to weave, even longer for more intricate designs.
Her work begins with the harvest of the pandan leaves. She then removes the thorns with a small knife and and strips them with a jangat deyum, a thin piece of wood with sharp tines. The resulting narrow ribbons are then sun-dried and colored in a boiling vat of anjibi, a commercial powdered dye.

To soften the strips and make them pliant enough for weaving, she crushes them repeatedly with a paggosa or heavy log, in a process called pagtabig. This arduous and repetitive chore is essential to properly dry the pandan strips without rendering them brittle and useless.


photos Renato S. Rastrollo

Haja Appi is famous for her even weaves and the creativity of her designs.
She does not work from a written pattern, nor does she use paper and pencil to keep track of each loop and fold. She relies on her innate sense of mathematical progression to calculate when and how the colored fibers will eventually join to create symmetrical geometric designs.What sets Haja Appi apart from her fellow mat weavers is the exceptional evenness of her weave and the startling creativity of her patterns. Although she uses a traditional repertoire of weaving techniques to create delicate, precise, and minutely detailed patterns, her simple geometric designs are dramatic bursts of color that both defy and celebrate tradition. “


I really love these traditional crafts which use natural materials and only hope that they can be sustained. Our society seems to be obsessed with needing to have more and more piles of cheap and tacky ‘things’. Surely one beautiful handwoven mat is worth 50 cheap mass produced synthetics? But the drive to show off the quantity of possessions, cheap or expensive, seems to be hardwired into many. Does it actually make people feel better? The sheer volume of really horrible decorations here, which spewed out of every gift shop before Christmas was staggering. Clogging up the shops one day, in the rubbish bins the next, but I suppose it keeps all the factories in China busy. (small rant, brought on by the news of the heartbreaking demise of first Royal Worcester and now Wedgwood, two of the great fine china factories in the world.. I just can’t believe it. It all makes me terribly sad.)

These sketches are done on a 8×10 inch sketch book with a black pen that will run a bit if you add water..which makes sketching easy and quick. All you need is sketchbook book, pen, brush and water…sometimes just sketchbook and pen will do, as spit (sorry) and fingertip will give you some smudging. Improvisation is the friend of the impoverished artist.
The pen is good for confidence in drawing because there is no prelim pencil work and no rubbing out, just straight in with the pen, you can’t fuss about with it. Worrying about incorrect lines is pointless and anyway if a root is a bit askew who’s to know. You can get way with an slightly misplaced root whereas an arm or leg wrongly positioned can be more serious.
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Root Sketches

Leaf of the Day: Snakewood Leaf 2 and the wonders of metamorphosis.

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Today I had the good fortune to see a butterfly hatching and, purely by coincidence, a caterpillar transforming itself into a chrysalis too. There are two chrysalis cases at the Gardens which Joel cares for with great solicitude and affection. He collects the butterfly eggs and raises them, through caterpillar stage, up to chrysalis stage, when he brings them to the cases. He nurtured and liberated over 1000 of these beautiful creatures last year.The butterfly garden at Leu is his domain. I was asking him more about the milkweeds which are the food source for the Monarch butterfly and as we were looking at the line of exquisite jade Monarch chrysalis, one began to emerge.

It is a fascinating sight. The butterfly at this stage has tiny crumpled wings and a huge black and white spotted body which over about 15 minutes pumps liquid into the wings along the main veins expanding them to their full width and beauty. We could see the butterfly experimentally curling and uncurling its divided proboscis which has to join into a tube before it can feed. At the same time a stripy caterpillar was busy shrugging off its striped coat and transforming itself into a chrysalis.

I held in my hand the tiny concertinaed skin of the caterpillar complete with little antennae and legs.
We may have all seen this on the TV and “know” about this extraordinary aspect of nature but to see it happening in front of you is riveting and it’s so quick. I was so busy watching I forgot to take more photos.

I did drag myself away to find the Snakewood again and then I bumped into Pedro who tells me that snakes like to hide in the snaky Snakewood roots and he has seen a couple of old shed skins there, which followed on neatly from the butterflies and also my thoughts about the leaves looking like sloughed skins. It’s a good time of year to consider renewal and re emergence.
He also showed me some beautiful little orchids which have just sprung up in one of the borders on the drive. I have not yet discovered out what they are.

I made a couple more root sketches around the Gardens which I will post tomorrow…Meanwhile I sketched another Snakewood leaf and there is a series about Darwin on the radio this week to catch up with, and I read some more about Burchfield…Oh dear…so much to do/ read/ listen to/ watch/ draw/ design/ write etc etc … so little time…. I am constantly running out of time and the white rabbit in Alice came to mind… so with apologies to Tenniel here is my own Time Keeping Rabbit reminding me that I should get a move on, which I think I will now use as shorthand in the posts, signifying lack of time.

I will have a few others too, each describing my day, sloth (often), procrastination (every day), despair (sometimes), inspiration ( fleeting), ..with a key in the side bar. I need never write again! I could just use pictograms..Hmm that’s a nice little project for a rainy day.

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Snakewood Leaf Sketch

Leaf of the day: The Snakewood Tree

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It seems this is the worst day of the year for low spirits, the euphoria of Christmas and New Year is over and for some, the unwelcome return to work, school, routine etc. I however am glad it is all over and I look forward to spring, which is my favourite time of year. In tribute I spent some time today spring cleaning my computer, in between reading about Joseph Stella and Charles Burchfield and thinking about some big leaves to draw. I am totally engrossed in the books. Burchfield’s story is particularly interesting. His diary entries are so poignant revealing his struggle, both to survive as an artist, and to cope with his own melancholy nature. More soon.
I have had some Snakewood Tree leaves here for a few weeks now and they are just gorgeous. If there is a Snakewood Tree nearby, you would probably see the pale curled fallen leaves before noticing the tree itself. This one is Cecropia peltata. The palmate leaves are big, the one I have here on the desk is 25 inches from top to toe, with 11 leaflets which curl up into fantastic ribbed shapes as they dry. Their outer surface turns pale grey/brown while the inside of the leaf remains a chocolate brown.

They also have these wonderful prop roots which give the impression that the tree is poised to move, just when your back is turned.

As trees they are interesting, useful and, I think, beautiful. They are used medicinally for all manner of complaints, the young shoots can be eaten and the handsome leaves sometime used as sandpaper…but no time for more research today.

I had been looking at these leaves for the last few days, not feeling quite up to the challenge. Drawing or painting them in detail is not a quick job. I made a couple of small sketches to encourage myself. One problem is to find just one angle that lends itself to a 2 dimensional piece. When you have one in your hand you endlessly turn it around to trace the twists and turns. Some are so contorted that they lose their leaf like characteristics and appear like the sloughed skin of a strange reptile. I will want to keep the leafiness of it.
There is also a sketch of the roots I made at the Gardens last week.
Roots, trunks and bark texture, are some of the “bigger”subjects I want to explore now. The variety of pattern and textures are infinite. Quite how I will do this I am not sure. Probably a combination of working from life and from photographs. I hope to go sketching tomorrow at Leu to look at these roots again.

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Snakewood Tree Sketches

Leaf of the Day:The Blood Flower

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One reason for the slight change of focus is that I have a small exhibition coming up in April (where else but at Leu Gardens) and although it will be mostly of the drawings and some of the blog posts too I need a few bigger pieces to give it some focus, here and there. So one plan is to make some larger paintings/drawing of some of my favourite leaves and also to make some extra studies of some of the most interesting plants. The theme of the exhibition is really my “diary” of a year of drawings from the Gardens, and I still have a couple of months to go before I have seen a full year there.
Planning an exhibition is a bit like developing a painting from sketches. There is an awful lot of culling to do and then yawning gaps to fill, to make it an interesting experience, even for those who are not completely fascinated by plants. There is no dedicated exhibition room at Leu just a hallway, and not too much space, so I will have to be choosy.
So which leaf will I decide to draw? and how big? and what medium? Oh.. the agonies of decision making..and I am spoilt for choice…

Meanwhile …… I found this seed pod yesterday. It just happened to be growing in a tub by the Irish bar we often visit, for an end of cycle reward, but this plant grows everywhere here including in the butterfly garden at Leu. I just had to draw it! It’s from the Blood-flower Asclepias curassavica , or Mexican Butterfly Weed, or Scarlet Milkweed, one of the milkweed family Asclepiadaceae which I have drawn before here.

The Milkweeds are really worth returning to again and again because they have played an important, if risky, part in folk medicine, food stuffs and are beneficial to insects. They form a large genus in the family Asclepiadaceae that contain over 140 known species. “Asclepias”, after the Greek god of healing, because of the many unreliable medicinal uses for the plants, and this particular plant’s species name “curassavica” refers to Curacao, where the first specimens were collected.
The reason the Butterfly Garden is full of them at Leu is that Milkweeds provide the only food source for Monarch butterfly caterpillars. It is another interesting case (as with the artistolochias) where, through eating a poisonous plant, the caterpillars themselves become toxic and unpalatable to birds. The flowers are also an important nectar source for bees, ants and humming birds too, and in the past were used as a source of sweetness by the Native Americans and early settlers.

The “milk” of milkweed is its milky sap, which contains alkaloids and can be irritant and toxic, but despite their general toxicity, the plants had many medicinal uses. One species Asclepias tuberosa was known in Europe as the “pleurisy root”, and was used to relieve bronchial and pulmonary trouble. Here is a short piece from the USA Department of agriculture relating to its use by the indigenous peoples here.
“Butterfly milkweed has many medicinal uses. The Omahas and Poncas ate the raw root of the butterfly milkweed for bronchial and pulmonary troubles. Butterfly milkweed root was also chewed and placed on wounds, or dried, pulverized, and blown into wounds. The Omaha tribe used butterfly milkweed medicine for rites belonging to the Shell Society. The Dakotas used the butterfly milkweed as an emetic. The Menominis considered the butterfly milkweed, which they called the “deceiver,” one of their most important medicines. “
(Hmm? Another possibly useful spell for my book …)

These delicate floating seeds are arranged so neatly and beautifully in their seed case but managed to spread themselves all over my room before I could draw them.
I also read that milkweed floss is coated with a waxy substance and has better insulation qualities than down feathers and that, amazingly, during World War 2, over 11 million pounds of milkweed floss were collected in the USA for various stuffing uses, as a substitute for kapok. I can’t conceive of how much volume even 1lb of these fluffy things would be, never mind 11 million.

At some time I must gather all these various bits of information together into one coherent post because the milkweeds, like many others, have such a fascinating story.
My drawing is of the pod and the few remaining seeds. I think my studio maybe carpeted with little milkweed plants later this spring which will make Ant happy.( yes.. he/she/it is still here!)
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Milkweed pod.

Leaf of the Day:Some Beautiful White Daisies

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I really don’t know of any other flowers that make me quite as happy as simple white daises. If I could only have one flower, this would be the one. To me a daisy embodies all that is pretty, light, airy and optimistic. I loved to see the wild oxeye daisies in the summer fields. My favourite dress until it fell apart was a 1950’s wrap around..it was green with white daisies. In the Victorian Language of Flowers, daisies were an emblem of fidelity, and also used in love spells. Remember pulling off the petals… “She loves me, she loves me not,” or “This year, next year, sometimes, never,” to predict your marriage. Think of the saying “as fresh a a daisy”. How can you look at this happy flower with its open sunny face and not smile.

So my first ” good omen” ..my first “light, gay flower” for this year is a very simple sketch of a daisy from the Daisy Tree Montanoa Grandiflora. This gorgeous big tree has been smothered in white blossoms for about 2 months, perfectly situated in the White Garden at Leu.

Not only do they have these beautiful flowers but afterwards there are these attractive green bobbly seedheads.

And there are other varieties of these lovely Montanoas, each with differing petal shapes.
Here, nearby ,is its relative, the equally pretty Daisy Vine, Montanoa guatemalensis, with more spidery white flowers

A fittingly cheery and optimistic flower to start the New Year.

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Montanoa Grandiflora…big daisy

Leaf of the Day: The Toothache Tree and a Swallowtail Plant

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There are times, when looking at plants, that I am torn between recording a fascinating story or an interesting image. As in life, often the most unprepossessing looking things have the best stories and after yesterday and the dentist I could not help but write about the Toothache Tree, Zanthoxylum americanum the Prickly Ash, the Suterberry or Tickle Tongue and its close relative Zanthoxylum clava-herculis Hercules Club.

The tree at Leu has very few leaves at the moment, so the drawing is less than exciting and even when flowering it is a modest tree, but one which has more to shout about than most. This one at the Gardens is Zanthoxylum clava-herculis. The Hercules Club name refers to the possibility that a club with thorns in it was used by Hercules.


Bronze Mace from Willingham Fen, Cambridgeshire”, The Journal of Roman Studies (1949).
This looks as though it would have been far more useful for my toothache than chewing a leaf.

The tree trunk, as below in the photo I took back in July, will develop very sharp downward pointing spines which protrude from corky bumps on the trunk . The smooth trunk is of the smaller tree at Leu which has no spines yet but the same mottled and spotted bark.

The compound leaves are covered with fine hair when they are young, becoming smooth as they mature and have spots containing aromatic oils on the outer edges and around the central vein. Even on this old fallen leaf I am holding you can see the clear white dots, which are full of oil. The smell is beautiful ..a little lemony.

There will be strange looking green colored flowers on old wood prior to the leaves and then seed capsules and later shiny seeds which are “edible” (if numbing) and taste spicy.


Photos of Zanthoxylum americanum by Steven J. Baskauf from Vanderbilt University Arboretum. here

The native Americans and early settlers used this tree to relieve toothache by chewing the bark or crushing it to made a poultice for their gums. The active ingredient is an alkaloid which I can confirm produces a quite pleasant numbing effect. I just chewed a leaf.
It was also used by native Americans for almost every other ailment you can imagine. Poultices for external wounds and infusions for diseases as diverse as gonorrhea, sore throats, and stiff joints and muscles.They passed their knowledge on to the early settlers and between 1820 and 1926, prickly ash bark was listed in the Pharmacopoeia of the United States and regularly in use for digestive disorders, to reinforce the nervous system and as a cure for cholera. ‘The Great Events of Great Britain’ by Samuel Neil, 1866, carries this entry for 1736, ” The toothache tree brought from North Carolina” and there are records that the bark was imported from New York into England in the 1800s and sold in Covent Garden as a cure for rheumatism. It is still used by herbalists for circulatory, arthritic and rheumatic problems and because it improves blood flow as a treatment for varicose veins.

Mark Catesby who painted this delightful Ground Dove in 1731 with an accompanying Hercules Club recorded that the birds liked to eat the berries and that their flesh, when cooked, was aromatically flavoured.
This seems to be an all round good tree. I look forward to making some drawings when there is something more to draw.

However I did see another new plant nearby today which has really pretty leaves and is an unusual plant in this exotic form although Christias have been known since the 18th century.


photos from Tropiflora.com in Sarasota here..who say they are good for terrariums..

The Swallowtail plant Christia obcordata has just been planted appropriately in the Butterfly Garden near to the Hercules Club. Originating in SE Asia it has very pretty leaves which are triangular and come in a variety of colours and they do look like little butterflies. It’s undoubtably pretty but there is not much more to say about it… I am tempted to make a comment about society here..? I ran out of time to finish them..

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Toothache Tree Leaf

Leaf of the Day: Little Kurrajong…and toothache..

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I was not sure if I would be doing a drawing today as most of the day was spent at the dentist..well 2 dentists to be precise. So in the gap between one and the other I drew this pretty leaf to try to take my mind off the complete horror that is my normal dentist experience.

I have now found 3 enclaves of Aussie plants at Leu. This Little Kurrajong or Rusty Kurrajong Brachychiton bidwillii is side by side with the tea oil tree, and the very strange Firewheel tree and a couple more eucalypts, one with the beautiful rainbow coloured bark. You would not find these too easily as they are by a fence and need some clambering and spider defying to reach.
The young leaf that I have drawn is covered with fine orangy coloured hairs which no doubt contributes to its ‘rusty’ name. Apparently most forms of Brachychiton bidwillii drop their leaves before flowering and as the tree ages the flowers appear in bunches of up to 50, sprouting directly from the trunk, as well as normally on the twigs and branches.
All these wonderful photos are from TopTropicals.com here where I go so often for information and images.

And look at these marvellous pods. The tree at Leu is very small and perhaps is not planted in the best place because I have never seen either flowers or pods, but maybe next year.

The whole family of Brachychiton are very interesting and very varied, with pretty flowers, here the Brachychiton populneus, Kurrajong, Bottle Tree,

and with fabulously shaped trunks, as in the Brachychiton rupestris Queensland Bottle Tree, similar to the gout plant.

I found several references explaining that the name Brachychiton is from the Greek, brachys, ‘short’ and chiton, ‘a tunic’, a reference to the coating on the seed? I am not quite sure how this fits so hope to find a seed.
The bidwillii of the name is after John Carne Bidwill an English botanical collector of the 1840 – 1850 period and man of many talents and responsibilities who amongst other things became a director of the Sydney Botanical Garden for a while. He met a grim and untimely death, “in 1851, while marking out a new road to the Moreton Bay district, Bidwill became separated from his colleagues and was lost without food for eight days. He eventually succeeded in cutting a way through the scrub with a pocket hook, but never properly recovered from starvation, and died on 16 March 1853 at Tinana at 38 years of age.”
Info from Wiki here

I can testify, emphatically, that drawing as a cure for toothache does not work (as I found for whole of the last week). I returned from the various dentists without any more holes drilled in my jaw for now, but with yet more antibiotics, which will make me nauseous, and a painkiller that would floor an elephant. I somehow don’t think that is an end to it ..sigh… If I were made of tougher stuff, like those true early settlers I would forgo the pills and potions and be chewing on a leaf from the Toothache Tree, which I first saw over near Tarpon Springs. I know the exact location of the one at Leu, its name tag has been uncovered during the recent cleaning and tidying. That’s where I am going tomorrow…
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Little Kurrajong Leaf

Leaf of the Day: Lemon Eucalyptus

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I seldom see the overflow car park used at Leu but today the post Christmas crowds were out in force. I think more because it was a free morning and “something to do with the kids”, than a sudden great outpouring of interest and affection for the natural world, but it was the perfect morning for a garden walk. Many people are here on holiday from the frozen north and they look in wonder at the citrus trees hanging with fruit, the giant pummelos, the beautiful butterflies, the roses and the just opening camellias.
I went to look specifically at more of the Australian plants and to find out exactly which eucalyptus the beautiful white trunks belonged to. They are Lemon Eucalyptus Eucalyptus citriodora.


3 Lemon Eucalyptus at Leu Gardens

They are beautiful immensely tall trees with all the branches clustered at the crown so no chance of taking a leaf without shinning up 50 ft or more. However there were some old fallen branches and after ferreting around in all the debris at the foot of the trees I found a cluster of the little urn shaped seed pods. They are much much smaller than the big bloodwood pods from last week and of course the leaves from this mature trees are the characteristic elongated shape. When not old and twisted and broken like the ones I have drawn the leaves are a beautiful sickle shape.
The white trunks have bark so snug fitting it looks like tight skin, wrinkled at the joints and there are several strange pock marks above the branch scars. I have no idea what they are.

The lemon scented oil from the leaves is steam distilled and used as an insect repellent although I didn’t particularly notice a lack of mosquitoes around the trees. It will have small white spidery flowers in panicles.

Here are a few words about the Lemon Eucalyptus from Stanford University’s online “Encyclopedia of Trees, Shrubs and Vines”. More here

The tall trunk, with no branches at all up to a substantial height, leaves a detectable record of bygone branches in the form of dimples and pimples on the otherwise smooth trunk. As a branch becomes shaded from sunlight as a result of growth in height, abscissic acid (a plant hormone), causes a brittle zone to form at the trunk. Wind then breaks the branch off cleanly. Research on abscissic acid has received military support aimed at defoliating forests. ( hmmm!)
Gum tree leaves vary a lot in smell when you crush and sniff them because the mix of oils varies from one species to the next, but with the lemon-scented gum the oil is virtually pure citronellal, known as a germicide and mosquito repellent, but with a marvelous aroma for humans. Occasional juvenile leaves can be found near ground level that have a visibly rough undersurface made up of tiny projections containing lemon oil. After you feel the sandpaper-like texture, smell your fingers! Onlookers are astonished by the fragrance; you can put these leaves in your gin and tonic!
(that’s better!)

The drawing is of some tatty dried leaves with small bit of twig stuck onto one leaf and some old gumnuts. Sadly these old leaves neither smell of lemon nor are they suitable for my sparkling glass of G & T.

For much more Euclyptus info do visit Gustavo’s excellent site Eucalyptologics
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Lemon Eucalyptus and Pods

Leaf of the Day: Red Box Eucalyptus

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This is another of the Australian trees from Leu, the Red Box Tree Eucalyptus polyanthemos. It is growing companionably next to the Bloodwood and near another expat, the pretty lacy leaved Silky Oak, which is not an oak at all but a Grevillea robusta.
There are several other big Eucalyptus trees which tower above many of the locals. You have to either look skywards to see them or you might notice their sensuous smooth white trunks, so touchable and so beautiful. I am not sure of their particular variety.


Red Box Eucalyptus

This Red Box Eucalyptus is a small tree, or rather I should say, a young tree, as it still has its juvenile foliage the pretty fluttering grey green leaves which earn it the name Silver Dollar Gum. These disc shaped leaves with a notch in the top, some looking like little hearts, will give way to the longer slimmer mature leaves. I am not sure I know of any other species of tree where there is such a marked difference in young and mature foliage. The eucalypts are another very ancient species along with the cycads and the ginkgos, tracing their ancestry back some 35 million years.

It’s late in the afternoon when I am drawing and my main drawing light is casting long shadows, which I liked, so that’s just how I drew this little sprig of eucalyptus leaves and, unlike yesterday’s pods, these really do have that wonderful aromatic scent. I once picked up a few fallen eucalyptus pods and leaves in Portugal and kept them in a small box. Opening this box several years later released not only that heady smell but also the memory of some hot painting days in Portugal. I remember the old ruined house, the donkey, the enigmatic ancient handprint in old plaster, the exact spot I picked them up, the friends, the heat….. and more and more. All that in 2 leaves and a pod. Now, every time I smell eucalyptus that’s where I go.

**For much more info about the eucalyptus, do visit Gustavo Iglesias’ excellent site Eucalptologics
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Red Box Eucalyptus

Leaf of the Day: Boxing Day Bloodwood Gumnuts

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Early on a sunny Boxing day morning all was quiet at the Gardens. There is only one day in the whole year that you cannot visit Leu Gardens and that is Christmas Day. For an hour I had the place to myself and with no plan, just walked amongst my now familiar friends, a time to reflect on almost one year of the blog and plan for the next. There have to be some changes, some developments but quite what, I am not sure. The best aid to thinking, for me, is to get on and do something else, so while mulling over my artistic endeavours I took a slightly different path from normal and came across a couple of new trees, and, to my great delight, a new pod.

I could see this tree had had flowers but way up high, much higher than my normal sight line, and not many of them judging by the number of pods, but when I saw the pictures of these wonderfully strange flower heads I was cross with myself for missing them.

Image and more info from Euclid, Australian Eucalypts website. here

This is the Australian Bloodwood, Corymbia ptychocarpa, from the Greek, ptychos, a fold or cleft and carpos, fruit referring to the ribbed buds and fruit. “Bloodwoods” are so called because of the dark red liquid exuded from a wounded trunk. There are 99 species of Corymbias which include the Red and Yellow Bloodwoods,the Ghost Gums and Spotted Gums. All are members of the Eucalypts and I had thought the pods of this one might have that wonderful eucalyptus scent but it seems not, and neither do the big glossy leaves.

These handsome trees are common in northern and western Australia and seem to grow quite happily in the southern USA too. There are quite a few Australian species at Leu, most promising wonderfully exotic flowers that I have yet to see. I am sad to say the Silky Hakea is not recovering..however, I do have 3 little seedling which are clinging onto life.

With half my mind on future plans, this a slightly absent minded drawing of three bloodwood pods, usually known as gumnuts, and a leaf. On one of the pods I could see the tantalising remains of the flower. The leaf is a lovely pale green with a central red vein and stem.

*** UPDATE JUNE 2009: Thanks to Gustavo at Eucalyptologics for the link and the drawings looks great on your site!!.. This is THE site for everything eucalyptus. see also comment below.
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Swamp Bloodwood Pods and Leaf