Wildflowers, Photos … and Boabs

Think Kimberley and the iconic Boab tree immediately springs to mind. In Australia this distinctive tree does not occur naturally anywhere else. The most easterly boabs are found around Timber Creek and in the Image Could Not Be FoundGregory National Park and extend west nearly to Broome and south to the margins of the Great Sandy Desert. Within that huge area boabs seem to be everywhere (well almost).

The closest relatives of the Australian Boab (Adansonia gregorii) are about six species of baobab or bottle trees (Adansonia) from Madagascar and a single species from Africa. Australian boabs probably arrived here as recently as 17 million years ago, as seed pods drifting across from Madagascar and Africa. An alternative but possibly outdated theory is that Boabs may date from the time when Australia and Africa were part of the ancient continent of Gondwana.

However they came to be here, they are a distinctive and useful tree, full of character and charm. Young trees are slender, gradually forming the distinctive bottle shaped trunk as the tree reaches maturity. However boabs are a very slow growing tree so maturity may take literally centuries. Frequently boabs are seen in mixed age groups, with slender juveniles, robust but upright middle aged trees and portly spreading elders making up family groups.Image Could Not Be Found

Boabs can be seen growing in a range of situations from harsh rocky outcrops, to sandy plains or clustered along drainage lines.

The trees are deciduous, losing their leaves in the dry season. Image Could Not Be FoundConsequently most of us dry season visitors to the Kimberley only see the bare trees that make such a distinctive sunset silhouette. As the wet season approaches the trees sprout their big leaves made up of 5 to 9 leaflets radiating from a central point.Image Could Not Be Found

Flowering starts as the wet approaches, continuing from October to January. The flowers are large, about 10cm across, creamy white and fragrant. Hopefully someone has a photo of a boab flower.

The distinctive boab “nuts” follow the flowers. Each capsule consists of an oval shaped hard dark brown shell covered with fine brownish hairs. The shell encloses the seeds and crisp white pith both of which are edible. Tourist souvenirs are created by aboriginals who carve the nut with a variety of traditional designs.

Boab trees are now grown commercially for the edible root of the young seedling. The roots when peeled and sliced are sweet and crunchy. However boab trees are protected, meaning that trees must not be damaged and seeds may not be collected from the wild.

The wood of boabs is soft and very open in texture and does not form growth rings. We saw a boab cut down in Derby and noted that the fresh wood has a rather unpleasant pungent smell. The huge trunk of fibrous wood enables the tree to store water in the dry season. Image Could Not Be FoundAborigines blended the sap with water to make a tasty drink. and ate the seeds and the pithy material surrounding them. They also used the wood fibres to make twine and nets.

As boab trees become mature the trunk may have a circumference of many metres. The wood in the trunk rots away leaving a large hollowed out space. Two exceptionally large trees were used by early settlers as Prison Trees to hold aborigines who were being taken to court at Wyndham or Derby. The Derby prison tree is estimated to be about 1500 years old. Another venerable old tree can be seen beside the Great Northern Highway east of the Willare Image Could Not Be FoundBridge Roadhouse. I estimated that this boab has a circumference of about 20 meters! The hollow inside is quite roomy and comes complete with aerial roots.

Mature boabs have bark that is grey in colour and very smooth. Unfortunately this makes them tempting targets for initial-carving graffiti vandals. However many early explorers used boabs as convenient landmarks and recorded details of their travels carved into the trunk. One such Tree is the Gregory Tree on the banks of the Image Could Not Be FoundVictoria River near Timber Creek. It is a marked boab, inscribed by the explorer Gregory in 1856. It marks the site of his base camp from which he explored the surrounding region.

Another such tree is the Hahn Tree off the Gibb River Road, marked by Frank Hahn in 1898. Perhaps the oldest European inscribed boab is at Careening Bay off the Kimberley coast, visited by Phillip Parker King in 1820 while undertaking a hydrographic survey of the Australian coastline. King and his crew careened his ship the HMS “Mermaid” and carved the ship’s name into a nearby boab. These carvings have mostly survived the passage of time with new bark not significantly overgrowing the contours of the initial carving.

In July 2008 West Australian Aboriginals replanted a mature boab tree in King’s Park in Perth. A road widening project near Warmun north of Hall’s Creek meant the tree, estimated to be 750 years old, would be destroyed. To save the boab, it was carefully uprooted, Image Could Not Be Foundplaced on a low-loader and driven for 6 days and 3200 kilometres with a police escort to Perth's Kings Park. There it joined a family of 14 other much younger boabs. Does anyone have a photo of it in its new home?

We were fortunate to see this travelling tree as we were stopped for lunch at the big boab east of Broome.

I’m hoping we can create a whole family of boabs on here, complete with flowers and nuts.

Cheers,

Val.