Did I read, or just hear, that several of the Eucalyptus in the E.H. Lohbrunner Alpine Garden had a difficult time this winter, but most of them are on a path to recovery? I was thinking of that when I saw the Eucalyptus gunnii at the Sunset Beach seawall at English Bay. There are mostly dead leaves on the branches, except for just a few bits, but there is a lot of new growth along the trunk, showing off the juvenile opposite arrangement of round sessile leaves, so different from the alternate arrangement of the more lance-shaped leaves with stems on the older branches.
Some nice epicormic growth there. That plant was clearly hit harder by the cold weather than ours at the Garden.
Unpruned cider gums are pretty consistent about being single trunked. So that the basal forking suggests this one froze to the ground on a prior occasion or was planted as a cutback shrub originally. Which would be a good plan to return to, as the tree is out of scale with the rest of the border in its current size. As for varying results from one local gum to another in addition to effects of individual site conditions and differences between species even siblings grown from the same seed capsule and planted near one another can range from killed to the ground through partly damaged to mostly intact after a cold snap.
