Eucalypt of the year 2025 – the Travel Edition

Wondrous Forests of giant Tingle and Karri forests to ancient Jarrah, Marri, and Red-flowering Gum woodlands!

Receiving over a metre of rain annually, the Walpole Wilderness grows some of Australia’s most enormous eucalypts. With tall forests on hilltops, unique peatlands in lowlands, and woodland slopes, it’s home to 45+ Eucalyptus species and two Corymbias!

Amongst the gums dwell some very special native wildlife, like the beautiful Sunset Frog – found only in the region’s peat wetlands – the reclusive southern forest Quokkas and the tiny Pygmy Tingle Trapdoor Spider, which lives in equally tiny burrows in Tingle bark.

Image courtesy Liz Edmonds

This Western Australian showstopper is one of the most widely planted eucalypts in Australia and around the world! In the wild, however, it is only found in a very small area of subcoastal woodland and heathland in far southwest Western Australia.

It has dark, glossy leaves reminiscent of a fig tree – hence the name fici (ficus or fig-like) folia (leaves). The huge red or orange blossoms cover the ends of branches in an epic show of summer colour, before falling to reveal huge woody gumnuts.

The Red-flowering Gum is a fantastic choice for streets, parks and gardens, and there are even dwarf varieties that can be grown in pots! Dwarf varieties grow to between 2 and 4 metres (on average) and others can grow up 12 metres although averages don’t always to individuals! It has a dense, shade-giving canopy and dark, non-shedding bark. Hybrid and grafted cultivars exist across a range of pinks, oranges and reds and can be planted in a wider range of climates and soils than the wild Red-flowering Gum.

Image courtesy Linda Baird

A deserving winner of Australian hearts, the Mountain Ash is the ruler of the southeastern rainforests and tallest flowering plant in the entire world!

We love the glorious shimmering bark of the E. salubris, the Gimlet or if Michael Whitehead of Melbourne University had his way, the “sexy gum”.  For the second year in a row a West Australian eucalypt took out the mantle of Eucalypt of the Year not in any small part due to the social media efforts of the wonderful Richard McLennan and his “Gimlet Groupies”.

For many, the image of Snow Gums, with their limbs, over which reds, whites, yellows, greens and greys flow like rivulets, partially buried under snow or in bent, windswept shapes on saddles, is synonymous with the Australian high country; yet this species grows from southern Queensland to Tasmania in diverse environmental conditions. Many Snow Gums will never see snow, though all will be dusted with their own snowfall of simple white flowers (the specific name pauciflora (‘few flowers’) is a misnomer). Across latitudes and altitudes, the species explores many forms. As well as the twisted mallee form synonymous with the windy, scorching or frosted high country, the species can grow as a thick, single-trunked forest tree up to 30 m.

With the most widespread distribution of any eucalypt in Australia, the river red gum is one of our best known Australian plants and has been celebrated in art, music, poetry and prose.

In flooded rivers, their roots protect young fish from predators, while high in the branches birds and possums play.  A scar or broken bough becomes a hollow home for marsupial, reptile or bird and submerged logs host giant barramundi and Murray cod.

Image courtesy Catherine Cavallo