If you go down to the woods today, or rather into the rainforest, you may catch sight of a local tree that is fruiting up an absolute storm.
The Koda, or Ehretia acuminata, produces small, bright orange fruit, and this year it is having one of the best fruiting seasons I've ever seen. Trees in the right conditions are loaded with so many fruit that the branches are actually drooping a bit.
One tree in a sunny spot in Tarrawanna has almost as much orange as green to be seen.
Koda is a rainforest tree, typically found towards the edges, and sometimes in quite exposed or sunny spots. There's one that's quite easy to see towards the top of Gooyong Avenue in Mount Keira, where it's growing on a dry exposed slope in recovering subtropical rainforest, and another (shown in the picture above) near the playing fields in Tarrawanna.
Trees at higher elevations on the escarpment where it is cooler are not yet fruiting.
Its deciduous nature makes Koda relatively easy to spot in winter. It and the two local cedars – Red Cedar (Toona ciliata) and White Cedar (Melia azedarach) – are the only winter-deciduous species in the region.
Interestingly, all three species have a wide distribution across various parts of Asia, and are relatively recent arrivals in Australia compared with the Gondwanan rainforest species such as Illawarra Plum Pine (Podocarpus elatus), which I've covered previously.
The relatively pale bark and the fluting at the base of the tree are other good ways to identify a Koda, particularly in a rainforest situation where the canopy is high overhead.
Koda is the only local winter-deciduous tree that has edible fruit. Each fruit is a drupe, or stone fruit, with juicy flesh covering a single stony seed. The fruit may be considered too small for humans to bother with, compared with the cultivated and 'improved' stone fruit such as cherries or peaches, but they are worth a nibble.
They are also very attractive to many local birds, including the Brown Cuckoo-Dove, Australasian Figbird, Wompoo Fruit Dove (which is sadly locally extinct), Green Catbird and Lewin's Honeyeater (the only local honeyeater that can be found in rainforest).
So growing a Koda would be a good way to provide habitat for these and other bird species. If grown to the north of a house or other structure, it will be able to provide summer shade while letting the winter sun through.
There is little local experience with using the species in this way, however, and performance of a tree on its own used in this way is not really tested. I'm always on the lookout for people who might have a Koda already in such a situation, or who'd be willing to give one a go.
Lack of experience is a barrier to wider use of many local trees in cultivation, including this one.
