Scarlet Flowering Eucalyptus

Scarlet Flowering Eucalyptus

When our friend Joanne was visiting us a couple of weeks ago from Minnesota, she was impressed by the brilliant red flowers on a large tree a couple of houses down from ours.

We had noticed that the flowers were extremely popular with the bees and hummingbirds, but didn't know what it was.  Turns out its a Scarlet Flowering Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus ficifolia).

It has dark green, leathery leaves year round, which also means that it is perpetually shedding those leaves on the neighbors' lawn.  I guess that's only fair, since her shrubs are constantly shedding leaves on our driveway.

The tree is resistant to the Eucalyptus Longhorn Borer.  It's a very drought-tolerant tree, but it does not tolerate freezing temperatures, which means Joanne will just have to come back to San Diego to see more of them.

One feature of these trees that has fascinated me for years is the interesting bell-shaped seed pods I have found.  I keep wondering how to make jewelry out of them.

Longhorn Roundup

Eucalyptus Longhorned Borer

We found a very odd looking bug on our front walk the other night--I'd never seen anything like it.

Its two most noticeable characteristics were its two-toned body color and its extremely long antennae, which were even longer than its body.

The bug wasn't going anywhere, so I had time to take a couple of pictures of it.

Turns out it's a Eucalyptus Longhorned Borer, Phoracantha semipunctata or Phoracantha recurva, a beetle that attacks (guess what?) eucalyptus trees.

These beetles bore into the bark of eucalyptus trees and lay hundreds of eggs.  When the eggs hatch, the larvae create entire galleries of tunnels in the cambium layer of the bark and their activities can stress and eventually kill the eucalyptus tree.

We don't have any eucalyptus trees in our yard, but there are many of them in the neighborhood, including several out in the canyon behind of us.  We've never been very fond of them; if eucalyptus trees catch fire the oils in the leaves and bark tend to turn them into gigantic flaming bombs that can send embers shooting off to spread the fire.  Not a comforting thought, and dead euchs would burn even faster than live ones.

Knowing that we have a pest insect working on the trees out behind us to turn them into dead trees is even less comforting, so once we identified the bug, we made sure it was a dead bug.  Probably too late to stop any damage, though.

It's too bad that this bug is such a destructive pest because the black and gold or cream color scheme is really striking and very pretty.  I may have to try to make some beads with that color scheme.  I'm not doing antennae on them, though.