A little like this

Maybe it will look a little like this....

On the page Putting Sassafras back to together again I wrote about some of the suballiances I believe grew here or there is good evidence for. One of those is suballiance 14.

This is an example of mature vegetation in the nearest site surveyed by Alex Floyd that is suballiance 14 in Boorganna Nature Reserve, the larger tree is perhaps a Brush Box with hangers on, figs etc.

Sassafras Wildlife Refuge doesn't have igneous boulders like these but has lots of smaller igneous scree that crunches underfoot in many places and has a significant igneous infleunce from same event that created the Comboyne Shield Volcano, which the Boorganna Nature Reserve sits on. The same hot spot in the crust also created what has become the Tweed Shield Volcano a little earlier as Australia drifted north. The Tweed Shield is more eroded than Comboyne Shield, perhaps one of the reasons for that is it is quite a few million years older.

There are at least 2 very large benches in Sassafras, where a large tree has fallen over and soil and rocks around the root mass have fallen off to create a bench below a semicircle in the hill side. The dimensions of the larger bench seem about right to have been a tree of this size. There are a few large rotting stumps, a mix of species, though nothing quite this big still in evidence.

The suballiances I have mentioned in Putting it back together have a mix of larger tree sizes, in any healthy forest there will be a mix of age ranges across those species unless there has been significant disturbance in the past few hundred years. Most of the larger tree species trees are not huge, they sit there waiting their turn if it is going to come. In this photo there are only 2 large trees, with more rainfall and more fertile soil the density of large trees will be higher.

The Wonga Walk from the visitors centre at Dorrigo National Park is an example of suballiance 7 I believe was also on Sassafras, it receives about double the rainfall and the density of larger trees is higher in many places. It was an eerie feeling when we walked that walk the first time, I already knew many of the species here and on the Wonga Walk I was seeing all the same species bar one which I later discovered has become locally extinct in the Manning Valley, but there they were, a lot older and bigger. I didn't understand at the time how that was possible, to have almost all the same species so far away. That walk also passes through a forest dominated by Eucalyptus microcorys (Tallowood), as parts of Sassafras are. Daisy Patch Flora reserve is the nearest area surveyed that was suballiance 7.

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