Word: paperbark
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...bottom of the slope, a path worn by unseen animals leads to a perfectly circular stand of trees sucking water out of the salty white gypsum. There are wattles, paperbark and bloodwood eucalypts; among them pink Major Mitchell cockatoos shatter the oppressive silence with their raucous screams as they feed. Fairy wrens dart between flowering shrubs, and from the knee-high sedges and grasses comes the whisper of tiny life...
...real terror of the Everglades is Australia's Melaleuca quinquenervia, also known as cajeput, punk tree and paperbark tree. A close cousin of the eucalyptus, with shaggy bark and pale yellow flowers, it was introduced to Florida in 1906 by Forester John Gifford of the Department of Agriculture, who thought it might attract commercial woodcutters. Unfortunately, its / hardwood interior, hidden by a thick soft bark, is runny with water and difficult to saw. Moreover, the Melaleuca sucks up three times as much water as other swamp trees, thus drying out the land, and its leaves are filled with eucalyptol...
...bald theorem, the story is nothing much. But White uses poetic means to suggest the self-defeat of a woman in whose face life has closed its door. Promised a view of an "estuary of black swans," Anthea imagines herself standing on the promontory that is covered by paperbark trees, near enough to see the writhing of the black necks. "Did she altogether want? Or touch the papery bark, flaking down, down around the grey dunny,* into opalescent scales. Sun and wind, to say nothing of moonlight, had worked upon the paper-barks. Better to watch without becoming involved...
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