I was surprised, however, to find whole forests of eucalyptus in Colombia in 2004.  The Flota Ormeño bus that I was riding broke down in the hamlet of Córdoba, in the far south of Colombia, near the border with Ecuador.  We waited at that location for 24 hours for a replacement bus to arrive.  This was a spot high, high in the Andes, with one precipitous cliff careening down on one side of the road and another ascending to the sky on the other side.  The upper cliff must have been sloping at an angle of 60° from the horizontal, and seemed to be very stony, but nonetheless it was thickly afforested with eucalyptus trees.  I thought they looked like eucalyptus, so I asked one of the passengers, without prompting him, what kind of trees they were, and he told me they were eucalyptus.  This was hard to reconcile with their Australian genesis.  There are vast stands of eucalyptus in Brazil and Argentina too, both at farmsteads and in the woods.

Wikipedia explains that they were introduced into California as a source of timber around 1850, but the scheme didn’t work out well, and now California too is overrun with eucalyptus, which despite their beauty, are considered undesirable, being invasive and driving out the local trees.  This must have been the case in parts of South America too.

The genus Eucalyptus is in the family Myrtaceae of the order Myrtales.  Formerly, Myrtales were considered an order within the class Magnoliopsida and the division Magnoliophyta.  However, according to the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group’s system, classes and divisions have been abolished, but the rest of the pedigree remains.  Angiosperms are flowering plants, excluding conifers, ferns, moss and other categories in the plant kingdom, and eucalyptus are the loftiest of all angiosperms.  Only the California conifers like coast redwood and giant sequoia surpass the tallest eucalypts in height.

Here are eucalyptus trees over 260 feet tall being felled in Tasmania.  The word ‘eucalyptus’ has two plurals: ‘eucalyptuses’ and ‘eucalypti’.  The word ‘eucalypt’, with plural ‘eucalypts’, is also in vogue.  In a scientific context the word should be capitalized, ‘Eucalyptus’, in which case it is never pluralized, but in ordinary, everyday writing, it should be treated as a common noun, ‘eucalyptus’.  The aromatic oil from the leaves of almost all eucalyptus trees, which is used in pharmaceuticals and perfumes, is called ‘eucalyptol’, ‘eucalyptole’ or ‘cineole’. 

Most species of Eucalyptus cannot stand temperatures below freezing, and that explains the rarity or absence of the tree in the northern states of the US.  For me, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what a eucalyptus tree looks like, but there are probably millions up there who don’t.

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