Coffs Harbours First entry to the 70 meter club! Eucalyptus Grandis just 20 minutes from the CBD
Before we get to this exciting discovery lets take a minute to ponder the history of tall trees around Coffs. Now I am far from an expert on this topic so maybe this is more opinion then fact. Coffs is a total hotspot for giant trees but it just does not know it. And would anyone care if they did?? The Vincent tree in Bruxner park is the areas most famous big tree but here’s the thing. It died about a decade ago. RIP big fella. Now according to the sign still displayed on the stump of the now deceased eucalyptus grandis he was 215 feet tall and 23 feet in girth. Immediately one wonders how old said sign is anyway? shortly after out comes google cause we’ve used the metric system for the last 5 decades. 65.5 meters tall and a little over 7 meters in circumference . Its my Belief that this trees claim to fame was its proximity to a road, in fact its so close to the asphalt its likely linked to its cause of death. Now if you detect a hint of cynicism that’s because there is. I mean for an area that was settled for its timber, the total lack of appreciation is beyond belief. Because just a couple hundred meters up the road are some of the areas largest trees, but no one thought to put a sign up. These colossal grandis are closer to 9 meters DBH but are on their last legs and will soon join Vincent in tree Shangri-La.
What if I told you the Tallest e. grandis yet measured is a stones throw from these other geriatrics. And while this tree down in a gulley is no show stopper in terms looks or girth or location its made up for the fact with a height that is over 77 meters. It may well be over 78. These are big numbers, all the most famous tall trees in NSW are closer to 71 meters. With the tallest tree documented in NSW around 82.2 meters.
Our new champion, Slim Jim. look closely at the top that just keeps going.
As you can see my photos are not doing any justice to this tall tree. So lets just get to the nuts and bolts of this find. Our lidar Mapping shows a tree between 77 and 79 meters tall. On the ground we found a tree with its roots at the very bottom of the gulley floor and the mid point of the base about 1.5 meters higher. With the laser shooting straight up in act mode (using the Nikon forestry pro) I was getting heights around 70.5m and one at 74 meters. But its easy to see in the above photo how hard it would be to laser the very top of such a tall slim crown. Instead I lasered the major V in the tree this was 55 meters. I moved up hill about 80 meters from the tree and was able to get a good view of the V and the very top of the tree. A number of shots with the flashing HGT mode gave me 22 to 23 meters. This is 77 to 78 meters tall! I moved further round the tree and got a better view, the one in the photo above. From here I lasered the first major branch on the right and the crown. I got 37m, I then returned to the base of the tree to laser the branch at 39.5m. I added 1.6m to account for my height as I was standing at the mid point of the base. We get 78.1 meters. The lidar did not have the major cause of error, a tree on top of a bank or on steep terrain, this tree was rooted in the gully floor. So the lidar had a good chance of being accurate, the height was confirmed with two laser measurements. The girth of the tree is 5.71m. Slim Jim is Coffs Harbours first entry into the 70 meter club but I can guarantee you there’s more trees ready to join the list including Coffs very own Grove of giants! Stay tuned as the discoveries will continue.
This flooded gum is at least 75m tall! This may well be the tallest Eucalyptus grandis yet. This tree is 7.75 meters circumference growing where flooded gums almost always grow, near a creek in lowland sub tropical rainforest, surrounded by bangalow palms, strangler figs and wait awhile. This patch of forest close to Macksville is full of giant trees and while this one is not the fattest, the LiDAR suggests its the tallest. As with all these trees in dense closed canopy rainforest its a challenge to measure and I was not able to get a single clean crown and base shot with the laser. We have developed two work arounds with the laser in this common situation. I will go thru the process I used in get these possible measurements. First of all the highest LiDAR hit was 79 meters. We have found that the LiDAR data is often a little over and its often because of the topography at the base of the tree, steep ground, creek banks and rock ledges can often mean an exaggeration. In this case the tree is on a gentle slope with no major or obvious banks or dips. The crown is directly above the base of the tree. My first attempt to measure with the Nikon forestry pro is to shot straight up from the base of the tree. I use the act mode. I shoot the crown until I start getting high hits, in this case I got a number around 75 and a couple at 76.2, at the time I was standing mid slope right next to the base of the tree. My height is about 1.8 meters. After I exhaust this approach I move onto the next step. Using the act mode, I shoot a prominent branch that I will recognize from a distance. I shoot about ten hits on the branch until I am satisfied that its consistent. From here its up hill till at least 60 meters from the base of the tree and try to get a view of the branch and the crown. In the case I walked a full 180 degrees until I found the view below. As you can see I was around 80 meters from the tree.
75m Eucalyptus grandis crown. This was a great view for the laser. NE NSW
I now switch the laser to the flashing hgt mode and shoot the branch and the crown, the red arrow shows my reference point. The results, from the ground at mid slope of the tree base straight up to the red arrow was 50 meters to that I need to add my height, say 1.6 meters. Then the from the red arrow to the crown was 24 meters. Total 75.6 meters. These are round numbers and they are conservative average of multiple laser shots. I also did the above process off a second branch and went back to the base to shoot the second branch from below. this gave me a total of 76 meters. In some ways it seems like the most accurate measurement is the first one shooting the crown from the base, straight up. however this is close to 78 meters, similar to the LiDAR. So any one wanna do a tape drop??
A Eucalyptus grandis, over 75 meters tall and 7.75 meters in circumference. NE NSW
Dendrocnide excelsa a 12.1 meter CBH giant stinging tree
This giant stinging tree in the Gumbaynggirr national park is one of the fattest trees I’ve seen. Dendrocnide excelsa a venomous tree common in NE NSW can get very large, the tree above is about 12.1 meters in circumference and between 35 and 40 meters tall. Its massive and its not alone as there are a handful in this grove that are almost as big. A venomous tree you say? good lord. Yes the tree injects a neuro toxin similar to toxins found in spiders and cone snails. In a classic Australian move its one of the most deadly plants in the world. Early explorer Clement Hodgkinson told: ‘The slightest touch of one of these leaves, occasions a most acute stinging pain; but horses suffer infinitely worse than men as their skin rises in large blisters, and great temporary constitutional derangement can ensue such as throwing himself on the ground snorting convulsively with pain.’
I have a few other patches of this tree to measure and it will be interesting to see if any bigger ones are around. These trees were shown to me by friend and mentor Lyn Orrego of the Nambucca valley conservation association who continue to work to conserve threatened forests in their part of the world. Thankfully these trees are in a high elevation basalt rainforest in a national park so hopefully for now they will stay safe. Many more incredible trees are found in this area and its high on the list for future expeditions.
Australia’s tallest Eucalyptus pilularus. The waterfall tree 75m tall.
The Waterfall tree, a Black butt, Eucalyptus pilularis growing deep in a canyon near Wauchope has smashed the height record for the species by 15 meters! That is if the colossal 60 meter Benaroon was the tallest prior to this beauty. A tall slim, elegant tree growing at the base of a waterfall in the lowland jungles of NE NSW was measured. And as you can see from the location this tree was a dream to measure and we have confirmed a height of 75m with LiDAR and two lasers. However with a circumference of around 5.55 meters its no match for Benaroon with an astounding 15.1 meter girth. Still we were over the moon to find a number of 70 plus meter Pilularis in this patch that narrowly avoided being incinerated in 2019. Black butt can dominate a forest and growth very tall so its really not likely this is as tall as they can get but its extremely note worthy to add this species to the 70 meter club. Please, someone pour this tree a cognac. Truth is we spent two days walking around this burnt thick fire regrowth, fighting through vines and past dead, burnt rainforest trees. The whole time I was looking at these black butts and then looking at my laser and shaking my head, this could not be right. It was not until the last day on the track when a massive 60 meter Tallowwood was dwarfed by a near by black butt that it sunk in. Sometimes, often, very tall trees do not appear all that tall. Perhaps its because they are surrounded by tall trees. A note on the tree measurement. We used Nikon forestry pro lasers, we used the two point, flashing ‘hgt’ function. We shoot the base and crown of the tree from the point the first photo was taken.
The team at the base of the waterfall tree about to head down the creek full of more very large trees.
I ended up Posting the first Photo on a few big tree Facebook pages. The photo preformed best on the Nuts about gums page were it got over 2000 likes and 90 shares. I asked the question is this the tallest and no other taller Pilularis were claimed, just the trees at Middle brother that are not as tall. There are many more outstanding Black butts in NSW and I hope to visit them and share them on the blog in future.
Dan, Eli and Jeremy at the base of Rubicon, NSW tallest tree. Eucalyptus nobilis.
The Eucalytus nobilis now known as Rubicon is the tallest tree in NSW and at 82.26m high this tree will be hard to beat. This is the first accurately measured 80m tree in the state. This stonking great tree will remain at the top of the list because not only is the tree very tall its also bloody massive! A circumference at breast height of 11.6 meters, and a volume measurement of 209 cubic meters!! Honestly this tree is a beast. The base of the trunk has fat buttress roots and torsioning where the trunk twists to help manage wind load. The main stem stays fat all the way to over 40m off the ground where it bifurcates into two massive stems. From here the tree breaks free of the tall nothofagus understory and shots up with massive limbs to its healthy crown. Other trees claim the title of NSW tallest tree but Rubicon towers at least 11m over the next “known tall tree”. However stay tuned because the measurement of Rubicon has started a new wave of record tree discoveries and this will be the place to read about them! Sorry to The Grandis, at 70.25m and long thought of as the tallest tree, you are gunna drop a few spots on the list. Still even with a number of new 75 plus meter trees Rubicon is king.
Brett Mifsud, A pioneer of Australian giant tree discovery and measurement in the canopy of Rubicon. Photo credit Steve Pearce
I first heard about the patch of forest around ten years ago. I got a bunch of friends together in 2017 and with my then tiny daughter strapped to my chest we took the plunge into this ancient cloud forest. At the time we only saw a handful of trees but it was clear this forest is something special. Ever since I have been dreaming of going back to explore the rest of this patch. Finally in 2024 Steve from The Tree Projects announced his intention to find the tallest tree in NSW. This was enough to finally get me back into the forest. With tape and laser I walked in thru moss covered teatree. Past deep sphagnum moss cushions and a 40 meter basalt waterfall into the dark mossy world of Antarctic beech and ferns. Every inch of the forest floor and trees is covered lush green growth. After about half an hour I found the first giant eucalyptus obilqua. After a few more kilometers I was in the massive nobilis grove. The whole way, there was not a trace of human disturbance. Large trees would materialize out of the ferns and I was zig zagging randomly between the creek and the ridge towards a pin I had dropped on google maps. I looked up slope to see a tree that was very big, as I got closer the tree just got more and more impressive. Looking up at the canopy, it was clear that this was bigger then anything else I had seen so far. Trees are deceptive so I wrapped my tape and found over 11.5 meter circumference. With great excitement I grabbed my laser and headed up slope to try to get a height measurement. An almost impossible feat in this closed canopy forest. still, I was able to get the view I needed to use the laser, a clear view of the trunk, base and crown of the tree. Using the 3 point measure function on the laser I began shooting and getting results over 80 meters, way over 80 meters. Finally I averaged out my hits to about 85 meters.
Rubicon from above. Photo credit Steve Pearce
Back at home I messaged my friend Eli who got to work making a LiDAR canopy height model, I also messaged Steve with some photos. Within weeks we were making plans for an expedition to measure the tree. Meanwhile the LiDAR showed two trees around 78m tall with many more over 75m. One was clearly the tree I had found at random. Steve soon told me that Brett Mifsud was keen to come, with a team of arborist climbers, Eli and his brother Jeremy were heading up from Sydney and my canyoning mate Dan was keen too. Fully loaded with hundreds of meters of rope, drone, camera gear and a mad max style air canon we went back to see the tree. Its an hour or more of hard down climbing to get to the patch but once there, the stoke was tangible. Steve and Brett, used to the giants of Tassie and Victoria were both taken aback by a tree this big in NSW!
This was a spring just near Rubicon where clear water was gushing out of the hillside.
How do you measure an 80m tree? by the book of course, Steve and the climb team are no strangers to climbing the worlds tallest trees but its no easy task. Firstly a throw line is needed over a high branch to get a rope up, que the air canon. Then once the throw bag and line is on the ground a 200m ropes is hauled over a high branch. Once the rope is doubled over a branch and an end is tied off to a nearby tree the other end of the rope can be safely climbed with foot and chest ascenders. The climber must then continue to climb beyond the main rope slowly, cautiously ascending to a suitable top anchor branch, from here the main line is reset so the tree can be safely accessed with minimum damage to the tree and maximum safety for the climbers. A climber, Tom, then climbs beyond the top anchors to a point were its impossible to climb further. A long extendable pole is sent up and Sam drops a throw bag straight down to the ground on the high side of the tree. A 90m tape is hauled straight up and attached to the pole which is passed back up to Tom and pushed up to the very highest branch. From here the drone goes up and UHF radios are used to ensure the pole is right at the top. The tape is pulled tight and the measurement to the high point of the tree is noted. The mid point of the tree is calculated by measuring the high and low point of the tree with a clinometer and dividing in half. This was a full days effort but it did not stop there. Steve with Sam and Toni went up and working together measured the trunk and upper limbs with tape wraps so an accurate volume calculation could be made.
Tom about to ascend Rubicon for the tape drop
Meanwhile Brett, Eli and myself went to check the other tree. It was clear that this was another 80m tree however at around 9 meters circumference it was not in the same class as Rubicon. Still this tree was also climbed and the tape drop showed a height of 82.17m however a dead stick went up a further 1.4m to total 83.57m. Everyone on the day agreed that Rubicon was the clear winner and a dead stick was just not enough to trump the behemoth. For me its an absolute privilege to be around these trees and to explore some of the oldest forest types in the world. Of many years of big tree hunting this expedition was a dream come true and I can only really be in awe of nature and its incredible secrets. Massive respect to Steve, Brett, Amy, Eli and Jeremy. Climbers Sam, Tom and Toni. And as always Dan. Head over to The Tree Projects for more epic photos and a 15 minute mini documentary. We have chosen to keep the location for this tree secret as the biggest threat to the forest here is human disturbance. To minimize risk we used metho to spray boots before entering the forest.
A 60 plus meter Eucalyptus microcorys, tallowwood, growing in Bellinger River National Park.
While its true that eucalypts rose to dominance after Gondwana broke up and Australia began to dry out as the climate changed. It turns out that they are not such a young plant family. 52 million year old fossils closely related and almost identical to modern eucalypts have been found in Patagonia in Southern Argentina. These are the oldest eucalypt fossils in the world and suggest that eucalypt forests once occurred over parts of modern day South America. Eucalypt fossils are also found in New Zealand. And while its hard to prove a Gondwanan distribution with the current fossil record, or lack there of. It is certainly tantalizing. Nowadays, The South American and Kiwi Eucalypts are extinct but the fossils remain to illustrate a potential Gondwanan link of Australia’s most abundant tree family. Modern Eucalypts broke away from a common ancestor around 60 million years ago, with some notable species like Tallowwood going back over 40 million years.
Another fantastic tree genus from Australia and New Zealand the Kauri pine also appears in the fossil record in Patagonia. Still other examples like Nothophagus, the southern Beeches. And Araucaria, think Hoop pine and the Monkey puzzle tree still occur on both sides of the Pacific. The ancient past of our part of the planet is still observable in our modern forests. In fact NSW has some of the oldest surviving forest ecosystems in the world. Places like the New England NP are a perfect location to step back in time and be immersed in these ancient forests.
flooded gum or rose gum, eucalyptus grandis Growing in lowland rainforest in Oakes state forest.
In the context of Australia when we think of Gondwanan forests we think of our rainforests in places like the Dorrigo National Park. Look a little closer at many of our areas forests and its easy to see the way that eucalypts and rainforest co-exist. A perfect example is at the Norm Jolly Memorial Grove in Nymboi-Binderay National Park, not far from Dorrigo. This is probably one of the most impressive stands of Tallowwood in the country with many trees over 50 meters in height and some over 8 meters in circumference. Growing among and below these tallows can be found a range of rain forest species like coachwood, yellow carrabeen and brush box. This kind of forest is much more common on richer soils then pure rain forest like at the Dorrigo NP. These mixed forests may well be more typical of ancient forests then we once supposed. In fact its in one of these mixed forests we find the first documented 80m trees in NSW.
A giant ficus sp. or is it two species? growing in lowland rainforest near Bellingen, NSW.
North East NSW has some of the most diverse tall forests in the world These forests consist of 143 species of eucalypt found in 159 different eucalypt forest ecosystems. The forests also contain about 3412 other plant species and 695 vertebrates. Some animals like the echidna, pouched frog and the rufous scrubbird are ancient species that lived in these same forest ecosystems when dinosaurs still roamed through them. Invertabrites and fungi are also plentiful but much more work would be needed to catalog them. There is a movement among some eucalypt enthusiasts to see these forests nominated for world heritage listing. Currently many of the publicly owned forests in northern NSW are used for timber production but these industrial logging regimes are loosing public support and are leading to declines in wildlife populations and in the quality and resilience of the forests. In an age of man made climate change our regions forests could be better used. A Koala National Park network would be a better way to showcase these amazing forests and ensure Australia’s unique forest biota have a bright future.
I have started this blog to share some of the best examples of giant trees in NSW and to help to showcase their value and significance! Enjoy.
Brush box are not a true eucalypt but they evolved from a common ancestor. Brush box are most often found growing in rainforest near gullies and creeks. They are a common tree in our regions gondwannan rainforests. In these ancient forests the tree can reach great height and girth, I recently surveyed a few of the largest brush box to the north west of Dorrigo and came up with this absolute winner! Probably one of the bigger known brush box in Australia. Though there are some bigger in the boarder ranges.
The tree is located on the tramway track in the Nymboi-Binderay national park it has a circumference at breast height of 10.7 meters, a height between 46 and 51 meters. While I have seen other brush box of similar height or taller none come close to the girth of this behemoth tree. The other large brush box that I measured is not far away on the Box ridge track in the Cascade National park. It is 9.44 m CBH, 40 to 45m tall with a crown spread of 6.9m. These trees are both many hundred years old and exemplary specimens of their species!
Gondwana Trees 