I’ve talked about the as yet unidentified fungi providing the missing link between TinT guests & hosts before, but fire may also play a part. It just so happens that I found an example of both these methods of persuasion 20 metres apart along the Ginghet floodplain last week. There is also a belah ringtree in this place that was created by giving one of the divided trunks a good whack to make it throw out a cross-shoot connecting the 2 trunks – simple. Growing trees in other trees is not so simple but these ingenious hunter-gatherer type botanical engineers managed this in a 16”/400 ml wildly erratic Ave. rainfall & summer daytime temps of Ave. 35 C. Here are these 3 latest Ginghet CMTs below and you can see how the fungus is actually attached to both the currant bush guest & the coolabah host in the main crotch of the TinT. Ive never seen this fungus in either of those species before! The smaller lower crotch also contains a wispy failing currant bush and may have been where the fungus was inserted?
I think fire is also an influencer in TinT creation but traditional fire expert Bill Gammage doesn’t think it would have been used for this purpose.
“Fire to clean out a crotch yes, but that would be small, and well within a tree’s defence capacity. They’re built to deal with fire, while weakening a tree doesn’t seem culturally right.”
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“Traditionally, trees could handle most/all fire by themselves – they’re built for it. If too weak, they’d not be much use as host trees.”
Below is what looks like a clay oven ball in a box tree crotch but the Gumbie gumbie guest isn’t exactly thriving. Clay balls like this were used to retaining heat during cooking and this one has been placed in a man-made crotch. The stone axe crotch has closed up more over time so you would now have to break the lump of clay inside to get a better look. The next pic shows one of those oven balls in the crotch of a box tree where the peach bush guest is dead. Again not a great AD for fire induced TinT creation. After that are 2 photos of a spot burnt wilga TinT but the burnt area is around the axe marks on the scar. I don’t see any scorching around the crotch where the guest emerges so it may be unrelated.
This wilga TinT below shows scorching around the stump as well. Whats happening on the inside of the stump can’t be seen because its full of wilga. Its not unusual for TinT hosts to have scars or rings or some other modification so a spot burn is maybe just another ‘mod’ (thankyou Sandra for that excellent abbreviation … makes me smile every time I use it) The other fire related combo is actually a ‘possum’ tree as well as a currant bush in box TinT. A possum tree is a eucalypt that has had a fire set at its base to smoke out a possum. This was usually a 2 person job – 1 to set the fire & the other to shimmy up the tree & wait by the nearest exit with a net or a club. The fire scar is very old as it has grown up the tree away from the ground & those epicormic shoots are huge. I would expect the currant bush came much later as it’s not very big.
Now this last fire related TinT lives along the Billybingbone rd near the Ginghet crossing & is harder to dismiss. Strangely for a coolabah host, the guest is a decent sized wilga – but the main trunk is dead. Wilgas & Peach bush, the most common guests by a long way in bimblebox, would normally never be seen dead living in a coolabah. So perhaps the wilga was persuaded to take up residence with a judicial application of heat or smoke around the seed? In the 2nd pic you can see a burnt chunk of wood hanging out of the trunk that certainly didn’t get there by itself. What were the Wailwan fire wizards thinking?
