Like any Australian, the smell of eucalyptus trees or the smell of the leaves burning immediately evoke the Australian bush for me. It even happens overseas where one can encounter Eucalypts in the strangest places. I remember finding some huge gums at the Monastery de Yuste in Spain. An exceedingly out of the way place where the Emperor Charles V retired to live a life of prayer..along with his retainer of about 50 people. What impressed me about these gums was that (apart from being huge...and I'd guess over 100 years old), they were unmarked by insect attack as one would expect in Australia. I guess they could grow in this remote place with no natural predators around to attack them.
Well John Wrigley and Murray Fagg have done a workman like job of putting this "celebration" of Eucalypts together. I say "workmanlike" because that is how it appears to me. It's not a great work of literature..the prose is functional but a bit like reading one of my old botanical or forestry text books. The occasional error has been allowed to creep in (eg. p219 the volume of timber in E. regnans reads as 358 square m instead of cubic m)...but on the whole it's been well edited. Some lovely photos but it's a bit formulaic somehow: A list of headings such as Classifying Eucalypts, Eucalypts in Art and Culture, Eucalypts in wartime etc. ...add some archival photos plus a bit of text ..and there you have it.
I rather liked the small vignettes on individual species that are scattered throughout ...despite the fact that they read a bit like a botanical key (and my old forestry text books). Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on them because they have actually done something that probably could have been done many years before. And they have collected a power of information about Eucalypts together in the one place. And some of it is fascinating. I did not know, for example, that a Mallett is a small tree, lacking a lignotuber and with branches angled steeply from low down on the trunk. (It's a WA term). Nor did I know that there is a Mallee tree....the Meelup Mallee (in WA) that may be 6000 years old (P210).....probably the oldest tree in Australia. And it's basically just one tree or clones of the one tree.
On the whole I enjoyed it and learned quite a lot. Oh, one thing that I did not appreciate before reading this book was that the early artists had a lot of trouble painting Eucalypts as they actually are. The best example of this in the current book is a painting by Joseph Lycett ( P 245) of a scene in Van Diemen's Land that actually shows Eucalypts more or less as they are but when the painting was turned into an engraving it was changed into the
English-type, maybe deciduous, trees. It really took quite some time before trees were being shown as they actually are in Australia and not how somebody back in England thought they should be.
Four stars from me. ( )

The authors are prolific writers and promoters of Australia's plant diversity. This particular book is a non-technical look at Australia's most iconic eucalyptus species. A broad ranging text that includes the social history of the eucalypts, uses of the eucalypts today and eucalypts in art and culture.