Melaleuca – The Paperbarks

A lovely group of trees, well represented on campus, many with soft, spongy, whitish bark that peels in papery layers. Melaleuca comes from the Greek melas, meaning black or dark, and leukos, meaning white, apparently referring to the contrast between the blackened lower trunk and white bark of M. leucadendra. The 17th-century naturalist Georg Eberhard Rumphius, who studied this tree on the Indonesian island of Ambon, recorded “fire tree” as one of its Dutch names, but doubted that fire caused the blackening, attributing it instead to the sun’s heat. He called it Arbor alba – white tree. Although the great majority of melaleuca species are Australian, the first to be formally described was this species from Ambon, which Linnaeus called Myrtus leucadendra in 1754, before establishing the genus Melaleuca in 1767.

The thick, layered bark of some species has been used by Aboriginal Australians for roofing, bedding, wrapping food for cooking, and even making rafts. Today the bark is sometimes used to line hanging baskets. Crush a leaf, and you’ll often catch the scent of its aromatic oils.

Pull a single melaleuca flower from its cluster and look closely at the stamens: the slender filaments are joined at their bases into five distinct bundles, one opposite each petal, with several stamens in each bundle. This generally distinguishes Melaleuca from Callistemon, the bottlebrushes, whose stamens are usually free rather than bundled. Because this distinction is not absolute, some authorities have merged Callistemon into Melaleuca, though the Australian Plant Census continues to recognize them as separate genera, as they are here.