Saturday, August 9, 2008

Photohunter: Dark




Here's one of my favorite sunset pictures, the sun setting over the edge of the Australian outback, framed by a bottle tree. Bottle trees are named after the fact that the trunk looks like a bottle, and that it holds a lot of water. The insides of the trunk are very fibrous instead of being dense like most hardwood trees we know. Having all of these gaps inside of the trunk allows the tree to retain a lot of water, a fact exploited by the settlers and indigenous peoples of the drought stricken Australia.

It can get 18-20 meters in height and 2 meters in width (60 ft high and 6 ft across). It is also called Kurrajong, which is derived from the word 'fishing line' in one of the aboriginal dialects. The fibrous inner part of the bottle tree was often used to make twine products, such as fishing lines.

Here's a picture of a bottle tree in the day time:

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

very informative. thanks for sharing.

philos said...

Excellent entry... dark photo yet enlightening as well. :)

Kimo and Sabi said...

Whut a beeyooteeful DARK photo!

Berto and Kwala said...

wow marine biology, your life must be pretty exciting! =)

and you take great pictures. the bottle tree in the dark is simply fabulous!

califmom said...

A great photo AND I learned something new!

Aisha said...

You have such a beautiful PH post. I love it.

Baker Watson said...

Now that is really cool. It is interesting to learn how some plants/trees were used by people, sometimes in such a variety of ways.

Cool post.

(BTW. you asked if the pond on my blog was natural or man-made. It was man-made. I answered in a little more detail in the commments on my blog.)

Baker

DrowseyMonkey-Photos said...

Oh, I really love that first photo.

Anonymous said...

hi there! just dropped by from philos... nice photo of that sunset... so many things to wonder about...:-) and it's the first time i've heard about such kind of tree... hahaha thanks for the information!

and, i'll add you to my blog roll!:-)

Rho said...

What an interesting tree! And love the dark pic! :)

JO said...

cool!

Rho said...

In reply to your post at my blog...yes, saw TONS of stars as it is SO dark, lol. ;) I love that part also.

Anonymous said...

I lived out at Roma in western Queensland for four years, in my teenage years, so I saw bottle trees like this every day.