So much excitement over such tiny seeds (or more accurately, in terms that will never be used in an up-market menu, even after the zombie apocalypse: “abortive seeds resembling sawdust“). Check out the mucky faces of these lorikeets. The yellow tailed black cockatoos love them too. At first, there’s just the occasional thump of the prickly round fruits hitting the deck, as if there’s a poltergeist at work. Then you hear a rustling overhead and a plaintive mewing, like a kitten stuck up the tree.
Don Burke doesn’t like liquidambar: they have thirsty roots that will choke your pipes and lift your pavers.  But the 20 metre tree at our place shades us and our epiphytes in summer, lights up the yard in autumn, and by May, let the scraps of winter sun that makes it over the hill slide in through our front windows. The piles of fallen leaves get kicked up by the kids, scratched through by the chooks and dumped under the trees as easy if messy mulch. With my pro-native plant prejudices I wouldn’t have planted it, and if the sewage pipe backs up I’ll come to hate it, but it’s easy to love a deciduous tree.