The golden, button leaves of the rare fargus beech brighten the sombre early days of winter when chilly winds laden with sleet and snow begin to bite in Tasmania.
The changing foliage of the fagus, or tanglefoot as it is also known, spur both local nature lovers and tourists at this time of year to visit the highlands where Australia’s only deciduous tree is found.
This year, however, the Coronavirus pandemic put a stop to such outings.
Obeying the lockdown, I was reconciled to missing my annual visit to Mt Field National Park to view the display until I read in the Mercury one morning that the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens was about to re-open its wrought-iron gates.
I would get my fagus fix this way, safe in the knowledge that somewhere within the RTBG grounds would be a native beech in late autumn leaf.
I searched high and low for Nothofagus gunnii in the Tasmanian flora section of the grounds without success initially. I was about to ask one of the botanists to point me in the right direction when I was distracted by a yellow-throated honeyeater feeding in the flower cones of a yellow banksia, and then taking flight to an area beyond the native plants. I thought the yellowthroat might be heading to another Tasmanian section I had overlooked but instead it settled in an area I had not visited before, one devoted to Chinese plants.
The irony of being in a Chinese garden because of a virus said to come from China was lost on me at that moment, as I discovered a display of plant species from a plant-prolific region of China, Yunnan Province. A display board informed me that all the plants had been grown from seed gathered at source, the seeds pure strains of species that had been widely cultivated for the gardens of Europe in past centuries – rhododendron, camellia, peony, primula, species of lily and rose.
The colourful and pollen-laden flowers of rhododendron and camellia specifically are a magnet for birds in the spring when they are in flower but during the autumn the birds in the reserve had forsaken these for the late-flowering native species like yellow banksia, and the fruits and nuts of other species spread throughout the grounds.
A visit to what the garden directory describes as a “bird hotspot” – a tangled mass of vegetation surrounding a giant cypress tree– attracted yellow-tailed black cockatoos in a noisy chorus, as they unpicked seeds from the cypress cones.
I meant to resume my search for the deciduous beech but was drawn again to the Chinese garden. The world of nature presented by the flora and fauna in the RTBG grounds sparked another connection with China. Before leaving home I had been sent the results of a survey of migratory shorebirds conducted in Tasmania during the summer, and as I studied the Chinese plants I thought of these waders. They were at that moment on their long journeys to mudflats in China, en route to breeding grounds further north.