Collected some E. robusta from a pathway outside Chung On Estate

Those trees bear a tag of E. robusta, but they look somewhat different from what I have seen in Ma On Shan country park. So I collected some dried leaves from the bottom of those trees for study.

Their leaves look narrower at the first glance, but when I compare them to what I collected from Ma On Shan country park, they’re just smaller, so to appear narrower. Another interesting thing is that they’re a lot more lighter in colour, looks like tannin contain is as low as E. globulus that I imported from the U.S. That makes me wonder, tannin contain may not be species specific, but environment influenced or perhaps it is due to different stage of leaf or tree growth. Another possibility is that those leaves picked from Ma On Shan country park absorbed the tannin from other plant matters, since there was a layer of a few inches of plant matters on the forest floor, and it had been raining non-stop for a few weeks when I collect them.

The major difference of these different collecting sites is that I picked mostly big individual leaf already on the forest floor probably fell leaf by leaf and probably been there for sometimes in Ma On Shan country park, while in Chung On, they were mostly dropped from the tree not very long ago, and they fell with the whole twig, so all leaves were still attached to the twigs.

But after close inspection, I am quite certain they belongs to the same species, most probably E. robusta.

Collected from Ma On Shan country park


Collected from Chung On site