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The phenomenon is exceedingly common, but so gradual that it is often not 
noticed. In the Botanic Gardens, Sydney, near the rockery in the Upper Garden there 
stood (until 1908), a Ficus rubiginosa tree which had never been planted by the hand 
of man. It arose through the dropping of a bird perched on a 6-foot hardwood fence 
which enclosed the Director's old garden. The tree finally absorbed nearly a panel of 
fence with the exception of the upper part of one paling, when the tree was removed. 
At the top of Dawes' Point Park, near the residence of the Police Inspector, were 
some very large Ficus rubiginosa trees, removed in 1912. Two of these trees had covered 
over dozens of palings, the tops of which were showing through the trunks, in which 
the rest of them were embedded, and the original line of fence was distorted as much 
as it could be. 
I have referred to certain Figs as strangling plants, but another kind of plant 
also deserves that name. In our coastal brush forests there are many plants which 
hang down like looping ropes. They are commonest in a tropical forest. 
They twine round other plants and sometimes destroy them, but some of them 
(Vitis), have the redeeming quality that they contain water, which can be obtained by 
cutting them in pieces about a foot long, and draining them into a receptacle. Ipomaeas 
(Morning Glory), and many other twiners develop the strangling habit. 
I have referred to the matter and given illustrations under the title " Aboriginal 
method of obtaining water " at p. 14, Part LI of the present work. 
(c) Fungi. In a garden, when a limb is sawn off a tree, the careful gardener 
paints the wound with tar. The object of this is to prevent the adhesion of fungus 
spores to the cut end, until such time, at least, as the wound has healed. 
It is only within the memory of most middle-aged men that the danger of certain 
fungi to trees has been understood. In Australia the caps (the Mushroom-like part), 
of many fungi have only recently been traced to their mycelia, and much less has it been 
known that they were injurious to trees, and therefore to timber. Even now, the life- 
histories of most of our Australian forest -injuring fungi have not been ascertained, 
although Messrs. Cleland and Cheel, in their articles in the Agricultural Gazette of New 
South Wales, are doing something to repair this omission. 
The article on Forest Fungi in Schlich iv, p. 374, is well worthy of perusal. Some 
of the species referred to are actually found in Australian forests. 
Not so many years ago fungi observed near the butt of a tree, or even growing, 
cornice-like on the bark, were not recognised as having organic connection with the tree, 
and therefore the idea that they were responsible for the deterioration of the timber, was 
not thought of. The Wash Leather fungus wits known as Xylostroma giganteum, and 
was not looked upon unfavourably by many, for had not this substance value for bunion 
plasters? As a matter of fact it is the mycelium of not one, but of many fungi, which 
are engaged in the destruction of timber in the living tree, or as sawn stuff. 
