Zoom down to the pictures. Wow!
This is part of my growing list of candidates, to be used in reforestation, in the Philippines.
This one is a
native .
I'm going to want some rainbow eucalyptus. The fastest growing eucalyptus variety and the only one native to tropical rainforest. It's one of only four, out of seven hundred and something, that are not native to Australia.
It looks quite exotic and they
sell it as such, in seed catalogues. But it's the most commonly used pulpwood, for papermaking in the Philippines.
The multicolored bark has to do with the time of peeling. It starts out green, then blue, then yellow and then it gets light purple and ends up sort of purpley brown. After the tree has been cut for a while it all looks just purpley brown.
I will grow some in prominent areas for the look, but my main interest in it is that you have good buildable poles in as little as four years, and pretty heavy timbers in 10. Big
trees are harvested for pulp within 10 to 15 years of planting.
I want to grow something that isn't edible, along the roadway to define the property boundary. Most visitors aren't going to miss this one, if you send the description of how to get there along with a photo of the property from the street.
Eucalyptus often don't play well with others, so I expect to do a few small monoculture blocks. They will be planted as tightly as recommended, and then thinned as they grow. This is to prevent a whole lot of side branching.
We will probably grow a few in more open areas, in order to get nice specimen trees, but most will be grown with an eye to future use as poles and saw logs.
I don't want to produce pulp, so we will branch prune and grow them tight
enough to keep the trunks reasonably straight. I would expect to do the first thinning harvest at 4 years which will produce some nice poles, suitable as rafters on smaller buildings. It will be necessary to thin again, when we have 8 inch material. After that, I'll just keep an eye out and thin anything that looks like it's about to die from lack of light.
It gets pretty dark on the floor of pulp plantations and Eucalyptus is a bad neighbour generally, so I don't expect much in the way of weeds or ground cover.
Fertilization may be carried out sometimes, but I think most of it will be just from leaf drop from neighbouring legumes. Most trees will be planted in narrow blocks on contour. A hedgerow of legume trees, up hill from the eucalyptus, will provide a good dose of nitrogen.
These trees are
water hogs and are sometimes planted in order to dry out mucky areas. When properly fertilized, these are the fastest growing tree in this country of fast growing trees.