Tasmania's flowering giants: 'We will never see such trees again'

In Australia’s island state of Tasmania, many of the world’s biggest flowering trees lie in ruins after this year’s bushfires.

The Arve Giant, a eucalyptus regnans (“king of the eucalypts”), had attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors in recent decades, but it succumbed in January.

Adventure photographer Steve Pearce recently photographed the collapsed giant. Before its fall, it was a contender for the world’s biggest flowering tree by volume at 360 cubic metres, which is roughly the equivalent volume of three Boeing 737-300s. “This tree was 87 metres tall. It had a circumference of 17.2 metres. Now it is just a crumpled mess,” said Pearce.

The world’s biggest and tallest trees are the softwood redwood trees of California. This year a 100.7-metre (Yellow meranti) flowering giant was discovered in the Borneo rainforests, topping the tallest of Tasmania’s trees by just 20cm.

Related: Almost a quarter of eucalypt trees found to be threatened with extinction

The Kermandie Queen, which rivalled the Arve Giant in volumetric size, was also severely damaged by the fires and has shed large branches which themselves are the size of regular trees. The tallest tree in the southern hemisphere, a 100.5-metre eucalyptus regnans called the Centurion, near the Huon River, was badly scorched but has clung to life. However, it suffered a crown failure and had its top reduced. It does not look well at all. Several neighbouring giants have died.

Then there was El Grande, previously Australia’s largest tree, in the Florentine Valley 100km from Hobart, standing 79 metres high with a girth of 19 metres and a volume of 439 cubic metres. It was, at the turn of the century, the world’s biggest-stemmed flowering plant.

Approximately 350 years old, it burned in April 2003 after catching fire in a deliberate burn-off of the debris remaining after the clear-felling of old-growth forest in the tree’s immediate vicinity by Sustainable Timbers Tasmania (SST), then called Forestry Tasmania.

STT is the custodian of the public forests and says it does not log trees taller than 85 metres or more than 280 cubic metres in volume. It lists some 150 such giants. However, the state premier, Will Hodgman, has authorised it to log stands of the next generation of the world’s tallest flowering trees. The younger giant eucalypts are being trucked out of the southern forests, which are among the world’s most carbon-dense forests. The national environment minister, Sussan Ley, backs the logging.

Referring to Earth’s climate emergency, Pearce says: “These trees are at the limit of physics, the greatest expression of nature possible given their environment. They evolved to grow under the conditions we had but don’t have any more. We will never see such trees again.”

Describing himself as a “tree nerd”, Pearce, 40, says of his days seeking out the big trees in Tasmania’s forests: “I love it. It fulfils me greatly. Every time you go to a giant tree you see something new in it and yourself. I see something that’s been alive hundreds of years before me and will be there hundreds of years after me. It’s humbling to consider all the years of my life are merely a small chapter of theirs. Climbing these trees is where I started. Up a tree you see things from a perspective no one else has ever seen.”

Related: Smoke plume from Tasmania bushfire turns sky red over Hobart

I asked him about last summer’s bushfire which resulted from lightning strikes in the adjacent Tasmanian wilderness world heritage area. Like most other places, Tasmania’s average temperatures have risen 1C in the last century and the heatwaves are more frequent and the air drier, a potent fire mix. “The big trees just copped it. The tiny reserves for big trees that remain after 100 years of clearfell logging didn’t stand a chance,” says Pearce.

I had recently visited a giant Tasmanian bluegum (eucalyptus globulus) near the logging town of Geeveston. It was awe-inspiring and, in a small patch saved from logging in a region where almost no other ancient forest had survived, it was a reminder of the sheer grandeur of the island’s original forests. These forests are also the habitat of rare and endangered wildlife that the government promotes as “must see” for tourists, such as Tasmanian devils, masked owls and the world’s only pure white raptor, the white goshawk.

That tree and its patch had been saved from logging after entreaties by the ornithologist Matt Webb who has campaigned long and hard for the flowering giants which are also both the food source and nesting sites for migratory swift parrots which fly to and from mainland Australia to Tasmania each summer to breed. “Anodised” green with blue, yellow and red features, and not much larger than budgerigars, swift parrots cross Bass Strait, which takes the vehicular ferries all night, in just three hours. They are the world’s fastest parrots. But facing introduced predators and the loss of their nectar trees and nesting hollows, which only trees more than a century old afford, they are listed as critically endangered. Only 1,000 breeding pairs remain.

Now the giant bluegum they so favoured also lies in burnt ruins on the forest floor. In Pearce’s photographs there are smaller adjacent green trees which obviously escaped the fire. “It is possible only a corner of the great bluegum caught fire and it smouldered for weeks before finally succumbing,” he says. I ask if the fire could have been put out. “Of course, but the giants are quite simply not a priority.”