This blog is the digital home of a project that began as a thought that arose as I was collecting firewood in a small patch of feral eucalyptus forest, beside the farmstead I was staying at in central Portugal. The thought: what the hell is all this flammable, nonnative eucalyptus doing here in the hills of central Portugal countryside – a place otherwise known as the wildfire capital of Europe – and so close to the farm, at that?

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I first noticed the strips of thin, orange-hued bark, which peeled in motley clusters around the bases of spindly trees I couldn’t name. They formed a strict grid-like structure, which gave this desolate tract of forest an eeriness I couldn’t put my finger on: where were the calls of birds, or the flutter of winged insects? These tracts surrounded the farmstead I had arrived at not long ago, and on which I would volunteer for the next few weeks. What kind of trees these strange figures were was unknown to me back then. Indeed, back then, forests were forests, the trees its residents – and this bark, I was told, made for perfect kindling once the winter damp had been expunged. There was little else on the forest floor but for a matting of the long strips of bark – some a metre-long or more – and weepy, lanceolate leaves, breaking down into a sodden mulch; here and there lay large pinecones, dropped by the rougher-barked conifers set amongst the unknown trees, which I packed along with the bark into the reusable supermarket bag on my shoulder. Warmth came from the small log burner in the farmhouse. The fire would be lit sometime in the afternoon, its heat warming us through the evening, and travelling upwards into the long, narrow attic where we volunteers slept.

Over the next few days, I became transfixed by these strange, peeling figures. I learnt that they were eucalypts, native to Australia; that they were Portugal’s most common species of tree; that most of it was grown for pulp, which was processed into paper, much of it toilet paper, and nearly all for export to Northern Europe. I heard about their oily, flammable leaves; their unquenchable, river-slowing thirst and their predilection for fire as a means of propagation. I heard about their prodigious growth, their less-than-friendly (allelopathic) relations with other species, and their penchant for popping up where they shouldn’t, particularly after a fire. And I heard about the fires – a normal part of the hottest, driest months here – but which in 2017 raged through this part of central Portugal, on land not far from here, like never before. Scientists even gave these fires a new name: megafires.

Forest fire had already been on my mind. A few weeks before, on the road to a small coastal town, I had passed through what remained of the Pinhal de Leiria (the Pine Forest of Leiria), still a partially burnt-out ghost of its former self. Over 80% of it had burnt in one of the infamous 2017 fires, which three years before I had watched on the blazing news reports with astonishment, feeling that all-too-familiar sense of mixed-up awe and sadness that seem to hum as the affective soundtrack to our age of planetary unravelling. That year some half-million hectares of land burnt, and over a hundred lives were lost. The planted ‘forests’ that had fuelled the development dreams of 20^th century Portugal were increasingly going feral, themselves fuelling other forms of flammable and feral proliferation. Progress was proving flammable, and the kinds of extractive and highly intensive forms of exploitation it had driven were turning out to be not only unthinkable, but increasingly unliveable.

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That was in the winter of 2019. Since then, my fascination with eucalyptus in Portugal has snowballed into being the subject of my recently completed Environmental Anthropology MSc thesis, based on two months of ethnographic fieldwork in that same region. You can read that here.

Eucalyptus globulus Labill.

Native to south-eastern Australia and a few surrounding islands, eucalyptus is a genus of some 700 different species of flowering tree and shrub. Eucalyptus globulus Labill. (hereafter eucalyptus) is the genus’s most prolific, and most cosmopolitan, pioneer, with a wider area of cultivation than any other. It is known globally as one of the major “tree immigrants” of the postwar period¹, and is amongst the most widely planted . Despite neither being the tallest, nor offering the best quality timber, it was the prodigious growth [1][2] of this particular eucalypt that would soon make it one of the foremost plantation species². It’s also one of the most invasive, a designation it has been given in 7 out of 15 of its cultivated regions³.

Many know eucalyptus for their citrusy scent, their blue-green leaves and colourful, peeling bark. But they are equally known for their love of fire. In plant science, they are referred to as pyrophytes, meaning phytos (plants) that have adapted to tolerate pyros (fire), or indeed need it for reproduction⁴. Their leaves, which court fire through the production of flammable oils, are known to literally explode upon contact with fire. The same oil gives rise to their “selfish” reputation, which lend the tree an allelopathic quality when they cover the forest floor, inhibiting the growth of other species.

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The first Eucalyptus seeds to depart their native Australia are said to have been carried by Sir Joseph Banks, the botanist charged with populating the King’s Royal Gardens at Kew with a collection of exotic plants from around the world. In 1768 he had set off on the maiden voyage of the infamous Captain Cook’s HMS Endeavour⁵, landing on the shores of what would come to be known as Botany Bay, in New South Wales, in 1770. Seeds collected by local Aboriginal folk left a newly-‘discovered’ Australia in 1771 on the return voyage of Captain Cook’s infamous HMS Endeavour. Banks brought back the first specimens of Eucalyptus to Europe, which were planted at Kew 1774, though it was not until 1788 that Eucalyptus was named as such by French botanist Charles-Louis L’Heritier de Brutelle⁶. Thence began the deterritorialisation of one Land⁷, and the reterritorialisation of another. The Land that bore Eucalyptus was a meshwork of entangled relations, between wind and wildfire, Dreams and memories, alongside plants, animals, spirits and people.

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Before long, living plants were being shipped back to the metropole at quantity, and in specially-designed boats resembling ‘floating gardens’⁸, to the gardens at Kew, where they were studied, categorised and disseminated around Europe and the colonial world. The dissemination of exotic seeds and seedlings these voyages facilitated marked the emergence of a new imperial botany, within which the categorisation and transportation of newly discovered organisms was drawn into an increasingly globalised project of modernisation⁹, which would further fuel the geographical rearrangements of organisms catalysed by the earlier Columbian exchange.

These early voyages were about mapping natural resources so as to be able to tap them for wealth accumulation. However, they were also about understanding how plants originated and grew in different environments, in order to grow them elsewhere, at scale (and, of course, for profit). As with cartography in the century that followed, imperial botanical science played a key role in the colonial enterprises of the long 18th, prefiguring in vital ways the proliferation of plantations, and processes of plantation unworlding, that would soon follow apace. The exchange of seeds these voyages facilitated marked the emergence of a new imperial botany, within which the categorisation and transportation of newly discovered organisms was drawn into an increasingly globalised project of modernisation¹⁰, which would further fuel the geographical rearrangements of organisms catalysed by the earlier Columbian exchange. And as with this earlier exchange, the consequences of such a project could not always be predicted or foreseen by the scientific and technological frameworks that guided these changes.

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Spurred on by outbreaks of dysentery and scurvy on the fetid ships, the Irish-born surgeon Dennis Considen who, some 22 years after Banks, sailed with the First Fleet – those 11 initial British ships, carrying convicts and colonists to from Portsmouth to Botany Bay in New South Wales – was the first to distill the plant’s leaves.

Considen would later become famous for his distillation of eucalyptus leaves to treat the settlers of the newly founded penal colonies. The kinnotannic acid of the Red Gum, known locally as ‘kino,’ was mixed in an alcohol solution and used to treat wounds of both colonists and convicts alike¹¹. Such medicinal usage of eucalyptus was preceded, of course, by indigenous folk, for whom kino, as well as the inhalation of the smoke emitted from burning its leaves had long been, and indeed continues to be¹², a remedy for cold and flu. A sample of the oil was soon sent to Banks¹³, and who had also been in communication with Considen.

It is likely that the ship that, seeds and living specimens in tow, brought Considen back to England had, on its outbound journey, carried with them a different kind of seed, one whose germination would herald the birth of a nation, and the slow and often gruesome death of another.

Eucalyptus, like coffee, palm oil and sugarcane, would become part of an imperial army that would aid settlers in colonising far away lands. In this early period, the species’ biological traits – prodigious growth, it’s ability to resprout after cutting, adapatibility to different environments – became entangled with the symbolism and ideology of the ruling power, entrained to the development projects of the times. In India, plantations of eucalyptus would be used as a political technology to proletarianise indigenous folk (ref), while in Ireland, eucalyptus’ insatiable thirst had led to it being used to drain boggy areas, priming land for development. Similarly, in California, this trait led to its designation as the “miracle tree” by settlers for its role in reducing the incidence of malaria¹⁴. Like the sylvan contingent of an imperial army, the tree was lauded for its ability to make “the environment more habitable for settler colonists”¹⁵. Elsewhere, in Spain, globulus became known as “the tree of the future,” embodying the aspirations of a nation on a path to Progress.

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[1] A study of its growth in a plantation over a 6 year period back in the late 19th century found globulus to grow an average of 49.5 feet, versus the 17 feet of maritime pine (Kinney, 1895, p. 15).

[2] The proliferous nature of eucalyptus had already been noted by the 19^th century, with “spontaneous” growth already having been observed.

1. Kardell et al., 1986 ↩︎
2. Warren, 1962 ↩︎
3. Deus et al., 2019 ↩︎
4. Oele, 2020 ↩︎
5. Warren, 1962, p. 38 ↩︎
6. Clarke & Tsing, 2022 ↩︎
7. Rathore & Nollet, 2017 ↩︎
8. Silva-Pando & Pino-Pérez, 2016 ↩︎
9. Goodman, 2016 ↩︎
10. Sharrad, 2007, p. 36 ↩︎
11. Sharrad, 2007, p. 36 ↩︎
12. Brasier, 2010 ↩︎
13. Vuong, Chalmers, Jyoti Bhuyan, Bowyer, & Scarlett, 2015 ↩︎
14. Davis, 2002 ↩︎
15. Clarke & Tsing, 2022 ↩︎

“The Tree with a Thousand Faces” started out as the title of an interlude in my thesis, one that allowed me to branch out from eucalyptus in Portugal to the genus’ more global, and globe-trotting history as one of the foremost tree plantation species of the last 250 years or so.

The title drew inspiration from Joseph Campbell’s famous 1949 book ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’. The book was an exercise in comparative mythology, wherein Campbell distills the myriad mythological stories of societies the world over into a grand and universal ‘monomyth’. Campbell’s claim to have found the ultimate ‘monomyth’ which can explain away the myriad diversity of human cultural and religious life was typical of his time, but today sits rather awkwardly in the philosophical space opened up by postmodernism and other schools of thought which look on at claims for universality with a heavy dose of suspicion.

For all the title’s anachronism, there was something about the way it posed a singular, universal figure against the multiplicity of its cultural expression that felt ripe for its own figuration. that rather apt in itself figuring some of the themes which continue to preoccupy environmental anthropology and other kindred disciplines.

To be continued…