The featured image is surprising enough – young boabs thriving, on the rim of Kings Park’s Mt Eliza, overlooking South Perth – a place with an utterly “wrong” climate.
Just a few metres away – and altogether more amazing – is Kings Park’s more recently-arrived but very much older boab.
If Guinness had a “longest road trip ever undertaken by a large, living tree” category (to qualify, the tree must be alive, still, a decade after its relocation) the tree pictured below would surely hold that record.
Imagine how ambitious/taxing it would be for you to drive from Jasper in the Canadian Rockies to Tijuana in Mexico – a journey of nearly 3,000 kilometres.
This tree’s July 2008 “road trip” was more than 200 kilometres longer than that, and it was then already circa 700 hundred years older than you are!
From every point of view – cultural, logistical, horticultural – this tree’s uprooting, transportation and successful relocation is perhaps the most audacious, “unlikely” single achievement ever made by a botanical garden.
In 2008, it did make “the news”, worldwide.
The even more remarkable news is that in 2021 the tree is in such good health that it may well be only half way through a lifespan of circa 1,500 years.
Click here for a written account.
Yesterday, in Warmun, in the Kimberley – where this individual began growing circa 500 years before James Cook set foot on Australia’s eastern shores – the maximum temperature was more than 33 degrees.
Yesterday, in Perth it did not quite reach 15 degrees.
It was very wet in Perth.
Not a drop fell in Warmun.
In both West Australian places, the local rain/lack thereof, was very “normal” for this time of year.
In a “proper” year, winter in Perth is very wet, and very much colder than in the Kimberley.
In winter, months often pass without rainfall in many parts of the Kimberley. There, summer is the wet season.
In a typical Perth summer, “absolutely zero” is not an uncommon monthly rainfall figure.
So, how on earth can this rare, “hot tropics specialist” tree be faring so very well?
Simply put, Kings Park has fooled it, for its own good.
As I type, it is quite likely that the venerable boab has just dropped its autumn leaves.
When that happens, Kings Park staff wrap the now-dormant deciduous tree in a “coat/shroud” that will keep it warm during the “too-cool” Perth winter, and keep out most of Perth’s “too-much” winter rain.
Come summer, the tree will be fully exposed to the now “warm-enough” air, and given lots of water…from the boab’s point of view “the wet” will have duly arrived, and all is well!
To see and learn more about the Kimberley’s boabs – and how they may have arrived there (the only other places where boabs/baobabs grow are all in Africa or Madagascar) – click this.
The big boab is far from Kings Park’s only “autumn attraction”, as you will see in Pelican Yoga’s next post.
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