THE TALLEST TREES IN THE WORLD.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue XXI, 23 November 1895, Page 646

THE TALLEST TREES IN THE WORLD.

IT is usually considered that this epithet belongs, par excellence, to the famous ‘ Big Trees ’ in Calilornia, variously known by the names of Wellingtonia or Sequoia. These are, however, far surpassed in height, and probably also in the total amount of timber in a single tree, by the real giants of the vegetable kingdom, the noble gum trees of the genus eucalyptus, which grow in the Victorian State Forest, on the slopes of the mountains dividing Gippsland from the rest of the colony of Victoria, and also in the mountain ranges noith of Cape Otway, the first land which is usually ‘ made ’ by any vessel bound from England for Melbourne direct. There are only four of the Californian trees known to be above 300 feet high, the tallest being 325 feet, and only about sixty have been measured that exceed 200 feet in height. In the large tracts near the sources of the Watts River, however (a northern branch of the Yarra Yarra, at the mouth of which Melbourne is built), all the trees average from 250 to 300 feet in height, mostly straight as an arrow, and with very few branches. Many fallen trees measure 350 feet in length, and one huge specimen was discovered lately which was found by actual measurement with a tape, to be 435 feet long from its roots to where the trunk had been broken off by the fall ; and at that point it was 3 feet in diameter, so that the entire tree could not have been less that 500 feet in total height. It was 18 feet in diameter at 5 feet from the ground, and was a Eucalyptus of either of the species E. obliqua or amugdalina. It should be noted that these gigantic trees do not, like their Californian prototypes, grow in small and isolated groves, towering above smaller specimens of the same, or of closely allied kinds, but that, both in the Dandenong and the Otway ranges, nearly every tree in the forest, over a large area, is on this enormous scale. Although they are not forty miles distant from Melbourne, and a coach runs from thence through the forest three times a week, the existence of these vegetable giants is scarcely known to Melbourne people ; and it was only after many fruitless inquiries among his Melbourne friends, and a reference to Baron von Muller, F.R.S., the Government botanist, that the present writer was put in the way of seeing them.