A Bush Capital Year by Fraser Ian;Marsack Peter;

Author:Fraser, Ian;Marsack, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CSIRO Publishing

SOFT TREE-FERN (Dicksonia antarctica)

BLUE RANGE, NAMADGI NATIONAL PARK. The all-encompassing fires of early 2003 jumped this gully at the northern end of the Brindabellas, and of Namadgi National Park, merely scorching the tree-fern crowns. It remains deep and lush and green. The tree-ferns are three metres high, entirely shading the little creek trickling beneath them. A rare Spotted-tailed Quoll appears from the bracken and disappears into the shadow. From up the hill a Lyrebird is calling, pure silver bolts of sound piercing the mist. The scene could have been set 300 years ago.

Take away the eucalypts and herbs, remove the lyrebird and replace it with an ancestor, an erect running carnivorous theropod dinosaur insulated with feathers, and the scene could have been set 150 million years ago. Remove the dinosaur, replace the quoll with one of its distant lizard ancestors, a shambling big sail-backed pelycosaur – no dinosaurs had yet evolved – and the gully could have been thus 300 million years ago. The ferns were well established by then and didn’t look very different from their current form. The pelycosaurs arose, chewed on them, and died out, leaving their mostly tiny mammalian descendants to scurry in their shade. The dinosaurs appeared, dined on ferns for a 160 million years, and died in the fire of a titanic meteor strike and the vicious endless winter which followed it. The ferns remained.

Like the softly luminous pale Ribbon Gums above them, they have a complex array of vessels, an intricate plumbing system constantly moving water and dissolved nutrients up from the roots, and sugars, the products of photosynthesis, down from the leaves. These essentials are delivered by the network of vessels (visible as ‘veins’ in a leaf seen against the sky) to every cell in the plants.

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