Free Eucalyptus by Murray Bail Page B

blue-grey, pink or red, giving a mottled appearance. The trunk is generally erect and symmetrical.
    The flowers are borne in rather large, compound inflorescences, whilst the fruits are ovoid, with short necks and deeply enclosed valves.
    And so on and so forth.
    The juvenile leaves may be a foot long with the petiole entering above the base. The adult leaves are lanceolate, falcate, almost equally green on both sides.
    In conversation Mr Cave employed with lip-smacking relish the terms ‘petiole’, ‘inflorescences’, ‘falcate’ and ‘lanceolate’, and he was also comfortable with ‘sessile’, ‘fusiform’ and ‘concolorous’. Holland who had never bothered with the technicalities sometimes wondered what on earth Mr Cave was talking about.
    Spotted Gums occur mainly on rather heavy soils, especially clay loams derived from shales, where the species is often associated with Grey Box ( E. moluccana ) and ironbarks.

    The species was first described in 1844 by J. D. Hooker, the botanist on the exploration ship Erebus . His early writings were on the flora of Tasmania. Hooker, one of those fact-embracing Victorians, prodigious in his appetite for classification and verification—a friend and supporter of Darwin. There was so much to do, so much to record. He could scarcely sit still for his studio photograph: the mutton-chop whiskers, hand of the worn-out wife resting on his shoulder. He was afraid of dying too soon. For Hooker, the naming and classifying of things lay at the heart of understanding the world; at least it offered that illusion. He died at ninety-four. Another example—entirely at random—of a hyperactive mind signalling the body along? Where did he, as they say, find the time? Joseph Hooker’s The Flora of British India alone is seven volumes.
    He succeeded his father as Director of Kew Gardens, London. And like his father before him his own name was given a descriptive prefix, denoting a higher classification: Joseph Dalton Hooker was made a Sir; for services to trees.
    Mr Cave had visited Kew some time before he arrived at Holland’s. It goes without saying that he made a beeline for the eucalypts, ignoring the representative trees and shrubs and ferns from every country under the sun (‘the oaks are thought to be holy trees in Lithuania’), the way a man in a great museum hurries past the rows of patiently begging masterpieces just to see one particular oil in an obscure corner—a tunnel vision virtually impossible to practise in a zoo.
    Mr Cave had assumed like any reasonable person that among the many eucalypts at Kew there would be a Spotted Gum planted in homage to their man who first described it. He also assumed it would be in a prominent position. But, no: of the two and only two eucalypts he managed to find after numerous directions one was a struggling Snow Gum ( E. pauciflora ), verging on the dispirited, and the other, outside the ladies’ lavatories with the louvres, a Cider Gum ( E. gunnii ). True, E. gunnii was also first described by Joseph Hooker; but the Spotted Gum is more beautiful than the Cider Gum. Connoisseurs claim it is the most eye-catching eucalypt of them all.
    Mr Cave checked the identifying label for accuracy, and although he didn’t want to be seen loitering around the lavatories paced about in front of the tree.
    The eucalypt looked out of place, perfunctory, ignored. A vagina-like slit had opened up in the lower trunk, as if in patriotic protest at its transportation and isolation. Women kept coming and going. Some were pretty, with children. Mr Cave kept pacing and standing back from the gum tree, unable to leave.
    At this point in the story he sat down on a bench and twiddled his thumbs. He didn’t know what else to do in England. Anyone seeing him would think he was being rueful.
    Vagueness was not something he normally felt; vaguely then he became conscious of a woman near