A couple of weeks ago, as I was doing some garden watering in the evening, my attention was caught by the remarkably beautiful colours in the bark of the Angophora costata.
The colours of rose-pink and blue-grey looked luminous in the early evening light. This is like the colour change of autumn leaves. The bark is a more rusty red for most of the year.
However, as it is summer, the bark has started to peel away showing a much lighter colour underneath.
When Europeans first came to this country they thought it strange that the trees kept their leaves throughout the year, but that the outer bark was shed from trees.
Another particularly unusual characteristic of A. costata is the twisting habit of the branches. The branch, above, hangs quite low and then bends sideways and back again on itself. I think it is crying out for a large ikebana installation opportunity. In the meantime, and perhaps for ever, it adorns our garden.
Above are the flowers that have opened on our tree in the last few weeks. They are sweetly fragrant, attractive to bees and other insects, and look very like many eucalyptus flowers. However, my reading has taught me that Angophora is a genus of six species and differentiated, by its flowers, from Eucalyptus.
A fact that I had never noticed before is that these flowers do not have a 'cap', the modified petal (and or sepals) that form the covering of the unopened flower in the Eucalyptus and Corymbia genera.
This close-up shows a cap, or operculum, just about to fall from the small Corymbia flower-bud on the right.
We have had some quite strong winds lately and some large pieces of the Angophora bark have been blown about the garden.
I was rather surprised to see one piece of the bark, where it had split, was caught on the rather pointy stems of the Strelitzia juncea.
No human intervention was needed for this floating garden sculpture. However, it proved an inspiration for my ikebana. As I had pruned the spent Strelitzia flowers and some stems overhanging the path just the day before I had the perfect materials for my experiment.
I placed the stems into two kenzans and zigzagged them so that they intersected where I could pin them. I have deliberately reversed one piece of bark showing its lighter underside and placed it behind the darker coloured piece. One of the very long stems had a soft 'S' curve so I used it as it was, as a contrasting line.
The shino-glazed bowl is by the New Zealand ceramic artist Elena Renka.
Greetings from Christopher
19th January 2020
Oh my gosh, I didn’t know there was a tree where the bark changes color depending on the season, and then sheds it, The colors are lovely and I like your very interesting arrangement using the bark.
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