SA Blue Gum

How to identify it

• Flower buds in groups of three. This is the single most reliable check.
• Smooth white, yellow or bluish-grey bark over most of the trunk, with a short rough sock at the base, roughly half a metre to two metres up.
• Adult leaves lance-shaped to curved, 60 to 185 mm long, the same dull grey-green both sides.
• Juvenile leaves broad (20 to 73 mm wide) and stalked, in opposite pairs.
• Fruit cylindrical or barrel-shaped.

Where it lives

Dominates woodland on the steeper, drier slopes of the northern Mount Lofty Ranges, including Morialta, Black Hill and Montacute. The larger old trees were mostly logged out historically, so most stands now sit over a grazed, weedy understorey.

When to look

Buds and flowers (white, and locally pink or red forms) through the cooler months. Pink and red forms feed honeyeaters and lorikeets.

Not the same tree as the Tasmanian Blue Gum (E. globulus). Also called yellow gum or white ironbark.

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