Guest post: The fires in the region

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One response to “Guest post: The fires in the region”

1. 

   Omar

   Jul 27, 2026 6:34 PM

   It has been understood for decades that if you don’t want forest fires you should clear the undergrowth regularly before it dries out, and you shouldn’t plant endless rows of identical trees, and emphatically not pines. So what do they do? They don’t enforce the laws about clearing the undergrowth, and they plant endless rows of pines of uniform size. Unfortunately, what we learn from experience is that we don’t learn from experience.

   In the late 1920s, botanists studying trees in relation to fire divided them into two broad classes: the pyrophytes (literally ‘fire-plants,’) and the pyrophobes, or fire-averse species; typically, those of rain-forests or ‘jungles,’ but also deciduous species such as elms, ashes and oaks.

   The pyrophytes are heavily loaded with flammable oils, gums and resins (eg pines and eucalypts) and are designed by Nature to burn. When they do so as a result of, say, lightning-strike, they clear out the competing species, and at the same time create an ash bed that is full of nutrients in which their own seeds, released in the heat, can germinate and grow. The pyrophobes include Lombardy poplars, which are excellent for interplanting with pines, but are unfortunately all males, grown only from cuttings all genetically identical, and so will eventually succumb to something like Dutch elm disease unless some genetically-engineered females can be created.

   Pine plantations are deliberately planted with seedlings as crowded together as possible in order to force them to grow tall and with thin lateral branches. This produces the highest quality and most knot-free timber for milling. But it also means that they burn easily, as they are doing right now in the Northern Hemisphere, and will shortly do here in Australia if the ‘top of the world’ is anything to go by.