The Feel of a Word: casuarina

The casuarina was named by Linnaeus who had seen an image of a tree from Indonesia. Its green growth drooped like the feathers of a cassowary and so the genus name Casuarina was created, a Latinisation of the Malay name for the bird, kesuari.

In Australia the common name for the tree was at first oak because the wood had the same patterning as the oak tree wood. The colonial habit was to call native trees after the English trees they resembled, often with the addition of the prefix she- to indicate that the tree was like the English one but inferior.  Thus the she-oak had oak-like wood but was not of the same standard as the English oak.  (In more recent times Paddy Palin has commented that: ‘Casuarina (she-oak) burns slowly on the camp fire and gives a good steady heat’, so the wood is good for that at least.)

Casuarinas were regarded with some admiration because it was recognised that they could flourish anywhere. They were to be found following a watercourse (regardless of whether there was water in it or not), around the edges of swamps and lagoons, in the middle of the desert, at the edge of a beach growing in pure sand, and perched high on a clifftop with heath and banksia trees.  They were stunted in harsh conditions and grew to become a lofty tree in conditions that favoured them. The secret of their success was the fact that they had rigid, jointed branchlets that gave very little water away. They did have leaves but these were tiny little teeth at the joints of the branchlets.

While most people appreciated casuarinas as shade trees and windbreaks, some found them gloomy.

In West of Centre Ray Ericksen commented:

The heavy shade, the open spaces between the black trunks and the soft carpet of needle-stems underfoot make for easy travelling in country which seldom offers such cool pleasure. Yet these places look sinister and threatening. The individual trees seem sad and defeated and the groves are depressing and forbidding.

This was a man who had observed his casuarinas closely. He gives an eloquent description of the young growth of the desert oak and goes on to say:

The slim branches … spray out in an irregular, wayward fashion to produce an open crown. It ought to be a messy failure, yet it is remarkably graceful, in much the same way as the inner quality of some women enables them to carry the straggling heads of hair that would be disastrous for most others.

Proportion has something to do with it: the width of the oak’s ragged head is usually just half the height of the trunk. Also on the credit side is the dark compatibility of trunk, branches and leaves. More important is the way these trees grow. They tolerate no shrubby competitors in close association and, even in the largest of their own groves, they never crowd together. Thus each tree presents itself as an individual.

I am contemplating a different species of Casuarina, indeed, probably an Allocasuarina since the genus was split based on two different types of seeds and some other features. But I too have tried to work out how it is that a tree that has so many untidy contradicting branches can, overall, appear to be harmonious in form and graceful.

And then there was the sound.  Some people loved it, some thought it was mournful.  They used adjectives like ‘eversighing’ and ‘whispering’.  The trees are ‘ever haunted by some secret woe upon which to moan and sob’.

Finally there are the effects of the light.  The sun in the early morning or the late evening can slant through the needles of the casuarina and make them shine.  If the needles are wet from rain, a ray of sunlight can have a striking effect. If it is the season when the tips are russet, the evening light can pull out a remarkable colour.

Today I think that casuarinas have dropped out of sight. Their beauty is subtle and cannot compete with the range of colourful exotics that we import into our gardens.  Even among the natives I think that in a popularity contest they would be completely shaded by the Western Australian bottlebrush with its scarlet flowers and its more regular form.

I remember the first casuarinas I met as a child in a creek bed near Canberra. I remember listening to the sound they made, like no other tree. I loved the needle-cushioned ground underneath them.  I thought they were wonderful. I still do.