flowers from rare ancient mallee trees

A lovely image and great artwork to put the flower images on the glass globes. I hope there are serious efforts being made to grow more of these mallee trees.

"Production of viable seed (seed capable of germinating) is difficult because the distance between all of the known trees is further than any self-respecting pollinator would want to travel," explains Gen.

This means the only pollen available to all Mongarlowe mallee trees is from its own flowers, which won't produce viable seed, or from other eucalypt species that are flowering nearby at the same time. Seed produced with the pollen from these nearby trees result in hybrids, which is a eucalypt that is a genetic mix of two species and does not produce a true Mongarlowe mallee tree.

The only way to fix this problem is hand pollination, and in 2001/2002 the first viable seed was produced using this method. Back then all the Mongarlowe mallee trees were flowering at the same time, but fast forward to 2020 and these rare eucalypts have fallen out of sync.

"Each plant is now flowering at a slightly different time with just a short period of overlap, making repeating this hand cross-pollination extremely challenging," says Gen.

"To complicate things even more, some of the plants are just not flowering at all!"

Wonderful photo. Exceptional artistry.

Gorgeous capture, lighting and shadows!