52Photos: Week05—Fairy Floss Gum?
I actually did not realise that there was such a thing as a pink flowering gum tree. Like just about everyone, I have seen many of the glorious bright red flowing gum trees and I was aware of what might be called the orange flowering gum. But I had never before come across a pink flowering gum.
I spotted this tree, only about two metres high, in someone’s front yard as I was driving out of the estate and I made a mental note to come back later in the day when the sun was lower in the sky and get some pictures of it. I needed to do it really soon as the flowering gums are all losing their flowers by now. In fact, most flowing gums have no flowers remaining on them by about the second week of January. So this pink flowering gum was holding its blooms later than typically is the case for flowering gums.
A few searches on the Web and it seems that this is actually called—I could be wrong on this—a ‘fairy floss’ flowering gum tree. I suppose you could imagine those blooms being the colour of fairy floss.
If it is not a Fairy Floss flowering gum—as it is not exactly the same as the picture of the Corymbia Ficifolia ‘Fairy Floss’ shown in the clip on this page—then I don’t know what it is called. From my few searches on the Web I could not find another close match.
If it is the Fairy Floss flowering gum then I wonder if the people who have it in the front of their house—only about a metre away from it—realise it grows to six metres in height and six metres in width.
There is another pink flowing gum called the Summer Glory, but the blooms on that are not a soft/pale pink like these flowers.
For anyone interested I also looked up the orange flowing gum tree to see if I could find out its real name.
It seems there are three variations of the orange flowering version and they are the Baby Scarlet, the Calypso Queen, and the Wildfire. The Baby Scarlet is interesting in that it only grows to about three metres high—which is ‘small’ for an Australian gum tree.
I found this information on the Garden Clinic Web site. Clicking on the orange flowers image will take you to that site.
And … there is a white flowering gum called Summer Snow or, on other Web pages, Snowflake. Who knew? A white flowering gum. This is also shown on the Garden Clinic site.
