Thoughtfactory: Rhizomes

bark, trees, roads, bushland

just a pile of bark

Lying beside one of the paths  through  the local Waitpinga bushland  is a pile of bark. It has been there a while. The pink gums (Eucalyptus fasciculosa)  are shredding their  bark and the pile keeps changing due to the  strong coastal winds.    Occasionally, when I am walking  by whilst on a poodlewalk,  I casually toss another piece of bark onto the pile, to see what happens. 

I often photograph the pile when I'm walking past on my way  to  a photo session elsewhere in the bushland. On the occasion of this photo being taken it had been raining  in the early hours of the  morning in early January (6/1/22) and the bark was quite wet. The colours were more intense and saturated than normal.  It was the colour that caught my eye.  

This picture of the same pile of bark was made about a month latter (8/2/22).The bark was much drier then:   

There had been some hot, summery days  since the subtropical rain in early January when it  had rained for a day or more.  This  kind of rain in the summer months was an unusual occurrence.   

Then a couple of weeks latter in mid-February as the bushland developed its normal   summer look I snapped this photo: 

All the above photos were made in the morning around sunrise due to the  prevalence of  brown snakes in the late afternoon.    There  was no concern with these photographs  to be poetic,  or to represent natural beauty or the sublime.  It was the mundane changes in the pile of bark over a six week period that I was interested in.