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hand, the invisible eucalypt, known by hearsay as E. rameliana , though never actually seen by anybody of authority, at last had a confirmed sighting in 1992 in the waterless wastes west of Uluru, so adding one to the eucalypt’s grand total. Monsieur Ramel, by the way, was the man who introduced eucalypts to Algeria.
    It is this chaotic diversity that has attracted men to the world of eucalypts. For here was a maze of tentative half-words and part-descriptions, constantly expanding and contracting, almost out of control—a world within the world, but too loosely contained. It cried out for a ‘system’ of some kind, where order could be imposed on a region of nature’s unruly endlessness.
    This attempt to ‘humanise’ nature by naming its parts has a long and distinguished history. Once a given subject is broken down into parts, each one identified, named and placed into groups—the periodic table, strata of minerals, weight divisions of prizefighters—the whole is given limits and becomes acceptable, or digestible, almost. It may as well be regarded as residual evidence of the oldest fear, the fear of the infinite. Anything to escape the darkness of the forest. Some men and women have been known to devote their lives to the study of nothing but the leaves of the eucalypts and grow old without mastering the subject. In time they resemble those gentle maiden aunts who reveal on request tremendous genealogical knowledge, the Christian names and histories of the family’s branches, who has been married to who and how many children, their names and illnesses, who died of what, and so forth; the history of hybrids.
    The point is, in the world of trees, only the acacia has more species than the eucalyptus—but look at the acacia, a series of pathetic little bushes. Whenever on his property Holland saw clumps of wattle, as the acacia is called, he lost no time pulling them out by the roots.

    The Black Peppermint on the slight slope between house and river was planted soon after Yellow Bloodwood. Accordingly it is engraved in Holland’s pantheon, like the bevelled names in small towns of soldiers who led a charge against all the odds across no-man’s-land. As he studied the botanical names and saw that Black Peppermint, a native of Tasmania, was also known on the mainland as E. australiana , the tree evidently began waving attention to itself as a sort of flagpole of the subconscious.
    Of course, from any angle the Black Peppermint looks nothing like a flagpole (and Holland had no right to load a simple eucalypt with worthless associations).
    It’s not slender and certainly not white-washed: see instead the one called Boongul or the Candlebark or the Wallangarra White, splendid examples decorating Holland’s land, not to mention the white-as-a-sheet Ghost Gum. In fact, the eucalypt’s normally smooth lower trunk is obscured on the Black Peppermint by a mass of twigs and leaves, the way a beard rushes to the weak chin of a man, filings to a magnet.
    The sight of E. eximia and E. australiana flourishing with their brave glossy little leaves must have heartened Holland. With no particular design he planted a few more.
    Trees were better than nothing, instructed the eye; this wasn’t the Sahara.
    Even then (that is, from the very beginning) it never occurred to him to opt for introduced species —the oaks, willows, walnuts and what-have-you, the various shade-producing elms, cedars, the cypress of the Mediterranean, let alone the terminally gloomy pine—better left to be pulped into newsprint and the low-rent paper used these days in literary and philosophical works. His affinity with eucalypts was both vague and natural; and before long he was having slow-motion dreams about them. (There’ll be no descriptions of Holland’s tree-dreams here! They would only try the patience of the reader, or else encourage interpretation. In city life, forests figure in