Aussies stunned by incredible pattern on trunk of roadside gum tree: 'Extraordinary'
An 'extraordinary' pattern stretching across the entirety of a large suburban gum tree has puzzled thousands of Aussies. The lemon-scented plant's 'almost muscular frame' stopped local woman Jacqueline in her tracks this week as she wandered back to her southeast Melbourne home.
Ducking down side streets to avoid the traffic on Chadstone Road, the mum told Yahoo she was immediately taken aback by the towering tree in the corner of a small park.
'I hadn't walked past that tree before,' Jacqueline said, adding she couldn't help but be drawn to the bizarre pattern of its bark. 'It's so striking because it's so regular, and this is a tree — we're not really used to that sort of regularity — but it's just quite striking when you see it.'
Jacqueline, who often takes photos of interesting plants and wildlife while walking nearby trails, said she had previously seen similar symmetry on parts of a tree's trunk, but never to this extent.
'This was the entire tree, reaching up to its arms as well. It's lovely,' she said. Stumped as to what caused it, the local snapped several images which a friend then posted online in search of answers.
While some Aussies suggested strong winds or a mesh fence were responsible, thousands of confused others said they had no idea what could have created the 'stunning and fascinating' pattern on the lemon-scented gum, otherwise known as corymbia citriodora.
There are a number of things that can cause such designs on trees, one of the most common being insects, however that is not the case with this specific gum, Dr Gregory Moore from the University of Melbourne told Yahoo News.
'It's part of the tree's natural growth pattern and there are several factors that contribute to it,' he said after reviewing the images. 'I've also got to say we don't fully understand it — nobody really knows why some of some trees show these patterns and others don't.'
Trees, like 'a lot of 3D growth', initially grow in a spiral pattern, he explained.
'You can see it on the top of a baby's head, you can see it in the pattern of a sunflower, and the way the tree grows, there's a natural twisting. In some trees, the twisting is very, very strong and it persists right through the life of the tree and it gives what looks like a spiral pattern,' Moore posed as a theory.
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Another possibility is that the fibres of the tree have grown in 'a fairly gentle spiral pattern'.
'You wouldn't normally see it but in some trees the pattern is exaggerated just because of the genetics of the tree and the conditions it's growing in,' he said. If the tree grows very fast, it pushes some of the fibres apart, and the twisting appears as 'almost a criss-cross pattern'.
'Very often, if the tree has been very vigorous when it was young, the pattern in the timber will be exaggerated, and when the bark grows over, you'll actually see what's happening inside the wood because it's a thin bark tree,' Moore told Yahoo.
While similar distinct waves can occur on numerous species, they are more commonly seen on smooth bark trees. 'But the twisty pattern is much more common in lemon-scented and in spotted gums than some of the other eucalypts,' Moore said.
'Quite often you'll see the pattern in younger trees, and then it'll disappear. But this tree, because of its particular genetics, it's likely to maintain it the whole of its lifetime.'
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