Casuarina cristata
Casuarina cristata, commonly known as belah or muurrgu, is a species of flowering plant in the family Casuarinaceae and is endemic to inland eastern Australia. It is a tree with fissured or scaly bark, sometimes drooping branchlets, the leaves reduced to scales in whorls of 8 to 12, the fruit long containing winged seeds long.
Description
Casuarina cristata is a dioecious tree that typically grows to a height of, has a
DBH of up to, and often produces suckers. Its bark is finely fissured or scaly and dark greyish brown. The branchlets are often drooping, up to long, the leaves reduced to scale-like teeth long, arranged in whorls of 8 to 12 around the branchlets. The sections of branchlet between the leaf whorls are long and wide. The flowers on male trees are arranged in spikes long, the anthers long. The female cones are covered with rusty hairs when young, later glabrous, on a peduncle long. The mature cones are usually long and in diameter, the samaras long.
Taxonomy
Casuarina cristata was first formally described in 1848 by Dutch botanist Friedrich Anton Wilhelm Miquel in his book Revisio critica Casuarinarum from specimens collected by Allan Cunningham near the Lachlan River. The specific epithet cristata means 'crested', possibly referring to the long, pointed bracteoles on the cones. The tree is called muurrgu or murrgu in the Yuwaalaraay dialect of the Gamilaraay language around Walgett in northwestern New South Wales. Other common names include scaly-barked casuarina, scrub she-oak, billa, ngaree, bulloak and swamp oak.
Distribution and habitat
Belah is found from Clermont in central Queensland south through to Temora in southern New South Wales. It is an important component of the endangered Brigalow ecological community of inland New South Wales and Queensland. Here it is found as a dominant tree with brigalow, black gidyea, bimble box, Dawson River blackbutt, E. pilligaensis and the smaller trees such as wilga and false sandalwood in open forest over mainly Cenozoic clay plains. Other plants it grows with include boonaree, sugarwood and nelia. On limestone-based soils, it may have a dense understory composed of pearl bluebush or black bluebush
Ecology
Belah can reproduce by suckering from its root system, and clonal stands have been recorded. Seedlings only appear after periods of high rainfall.