Botanical name            Pandorea pandorana subsp. pandorana

A common name          Wonga Vine

Seedling

From little seedlings big vines grow......we don't have acorns :-)

Pandorea pandorana subsp. pandorana have delicate looking little leaves, actually they are pinnae not individual leaves.  They pop up quite readily in damp times.  I count 4, maybe 5 in this photo, along with 3 Acmena smithii

There are some weeds here too, there is a Small Leaf Privet seedling on the right hand side and possbily a Choko or Moth vine seedling half way up on the left hand side.

Young plant

Coming

Juvenile

Coming

Reasonably mature

I guess it is one of those species that has a bit of variability, at least when you compare to it to the various cultivars around.

These leaves are on an off shoot from the main vine which has wandered over to a Eucalyptus microcorys.  Most of our large Wonga vines are on E. microcorys but they can be found smothering Endiandra muelleri or Schizomeria ovata.  They tend to be partially or fully deciduous here, we do get rather cold and very frosty out in the open.  We have recorded -8 degrees celcius one Winter, 1.5 metres above the back verandah deck, which at that point is another .5 metres above ground

One issue I've had is getting passable photos of the flowers, they tend to be a very long way up. 

The 18 to 200mm zoom on the Pentax still camera is not up to the task, the flowers are just too far away.  I have resorted to my newer Sony Handicam which comes with a built in 25x zoom, to which I've added an old Hama 2x teleconverter, with an adapter ring, giving me 50x zoom.  Pretty good but the built in still facility is only just ok, but not at this level of zoom, the Pentax always produces better still images when the subject is close enough.  For this task I extracted some stills from the video stream.  Not truly wonderful quality but you get the idea.  That said this little video camera on the tripod did some amazing things looking a long long way up, or a long way away at trees in Bunya Mountains National Park and the Border Ranges National Park a few months ago.  Back to the job at hand.  I have included the full image file for these long shots, any reduction and you loose too much of what little detail is visible.

This vine had started flowering a couple of days ago, just a few flowers, in week it will be white seemingly all over.  Further down the page you will get some idea just how high up these flowers are.  Of particular interest to me were the leaf vein patterns, any leaf point and if there was gap in the rachis.  The leaves themselves don't look much like any other Wonga Vine leaves I've seen images of, apart from the line drawings in Rainforest Climbing Plants.

I include this image for the few leaves seen from underneath, the leaves below the right most flowers. There is also a leaf behind the stem at right with good lateral vein tracery visible, but not net veins.  Actually it was when I saw the distribution for P. baileyana I figured, no this is most likely P. pandorana subsp. pandorana, then I had a read at the ANPSA, that made up my mind.

Just a better shot of some unopened flowers and more leaves.  In another week or so the forest will be quite fragrant with many tens of thousands of Wonga Vine flowers filling the air with their fragrance.
OK, this one is on a Eucalyptus saligna, I did say most of them.  Most this vine is above the top of the image.  Very little of the green you can see on this tree is Eucalypt leaf, they haven't started yet, the first two branches are at the top of the picture.  So the vine trellis is only just begining.























Look a the tree trunk to the left, those wiggly bits next to the trunk are the Wonga Vine vines.  The one coming in at a angle is quite sizeable a little lower down.

I hadn't figured out how to do panoramic shots when I took this one.  They will all be in flower shortly so I will create some full length images.


Pandorea pandorana subsp. pandorana is quite a rampant vine, though not as vigorous as some.

This is a closer inspection of the vines in the area to the left of the text above.
This time it's a Eucalyptus microcorys that is the trellis for the Pandorea pandorana subsp. pandorana. 

It is a little hard to convey the actual amount of vine in this Eucalypt, suffice to say it is a lot.  Bear in mind though that Pandorea is not the most vigorous of the many tree climbing vines, not by a long way.

There is an excellent specimen of Maclura cochinensis in Wingham Brush that has a trunk worthy of quite a large tree.  It grows up one of the larger Ficus macrophylla. Maybe I will take a photo of it to demonstrate what they can do, and also what the spurs are like too, to give it the common name of Cocks Spur Vine.

The same tree, just a wider shot, all the vines are Pandorea pandorana subsp. pandorana.