ARTICLES
Climate Change confuses Flowering Trees
By George Pinniger
A long time has passed since I was in Kindy! Things were much simpler then; we had lots of rules that we were taught over and over
again. Every day we stood to sing “God Save the Queen” while saluting the Australian flag. We celebrated everyone’s birthday, usually
with cake, and also had quite a number of “special days”, including Wattle Day and Arbor Day, not actual true holidays that we stayed
at home for, but were deemed special by the teachers, so most of us went along with that.
I recall the little song we were all taught to sing around the middle of August to celebrate Wattle Day at the end of winter:
The bush was grey a week today –
Olive-green, and brown and grey.
But now the spring has come this way
with blossoms for the wattle.
It seems to be a fairy tree –
it dances to a melody,
and sings a little song to me –
the graceful, swaying wattle.
Not far from where I live there’s a fairly small but beautiful patch of wetland I like to visit. Actually, all too soon the M-6 Motorway is very
likely to make it disappear in the name of “Progress”, but I hope not because Bayside Council keeps it as tidy as possible, and great
numbers of waterbirds are always there, fairly secure from predatory cats because they can rest or nest on a few small islands in the
lake. It’s peaceful and beautiful. The Council discovered that small turtles (terrapins) also live in the waters, and made a small floating
island for them as well. There’s a bridge crossing the water about halfway between its northern and southern extremities, where many
people bring children to toss bread to the hundreds of ducks and other waterfowl that inhabit this spot.
25th June:
This is usually the first
wattle to bloom; there
ar tiny yellow points on
many branches, but
none are identifiable as
blossoms.
The three wattles I will focus
upon: the tree in image 1. is on
the right. Currently the other
two trees show no signs of
blossoms.
Other types of flowering trees
have already begun to bud.
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SCIENCE EDUCATIONAL NEWS VOL 68 NO 3
About 50 m south of the three
trees, a banksia already
has a large number of those
familiar bottle-brush flowers –
mainly a pale yellow.