Flowering now: stunning Sassafras trees
This common tree is having a brilliant winter in rainforest of the escarpment
I wrote about the plight of the local Sassafras trees (Doryphora sassafras) last April. Many trees had been significantly defoliated by stick insects eating the leaves, and some had almost no leaves left at all.
It is a different story this winter, with most of the Sassafras specimens I've seen recently looking pretty healthy and happy. Several are also brilliantly in flower, so it's a good time to see the flowers of this common tree.
The best place to see it is in rainforest on the escarpment. Trees are plentiful along the Mount Keira ring track, at the Mount Keira Scout Camp and at the Illawarra Rhododendron and Rainforest Gardens in Mount Pleasant. In fact, this last spot is one of the best for seeing the flowers, as there's a specimen with low-hanging branches where the flowers are visible at head height.
The image below gives you a sense of what Sassafras inflorescences are like at close quarters.
I really like to stick my nose into a group of these flowers (checking carefully for insects first) and inhale their gently spicy scent. I love the look and feel of the petals and sepals, which are an almost unreally white white, and soft to the touch. I enjoy seeing the large group of long and sometimes rather wavy white stamens in the centre of each flower, where there's also a tinge of yellow.
I usually find it hard to resist crushing a portion of a leaf to release its sweet and cinnamon-y smell. And I always admire the narrow, straight, uniformly grey-brown trunks, sometimes multiple on the one tree, that spire upwards; most often this tree branches high up with fairly narrow branches relative to its trunk size, so the tree in the Rhodo Gardens with its accessible branches is a little bit special.
