Finger Lime Country

Organic Finger Limes - where do they come from ?

Around sixty five million years ago the giant continent of Gondwana started to split up and one of its offspring began an inexorable drift northwards at about 15 centimeters a year. Around 42 million years later the east coast of this new island continent slowly crawled over a geological hotspot that melted its crust and burst through, creating a massive volcano which at its peak was almost two kilometers high and over its three million year active life the belching behemoth spewed out so much larva that it eventually covered an area of nearly seven thousand square kilometers. As Australia slowly moved off the hotspot the volcano cooled down and went dormant. More tens of millions of years and many trillions of litres of rainfall later, it melted down into a giant caldera of ragged ridges some forty kilometers wide with a huge remnant plug at its center, giving it the bird’s eye appearance of a giant sombrero. As the climate cooled into a mild sub-tropic, the circle of mountains lifted the warm and moist monsoon clouds and turned them into precipitous rainfall.

The caldera evolved into a veritable Garden of Eden, over, under and above which swarmed a staggering variety of animal life. Vast flocks of colourful parrots chattered and fat pigeons cooed through the misty canopies of rainforest giants that rose up to one hundred meters above the rich, red volcanic soil, a jungle of floral diversity which housed one of the most prolific varieties of species in the animal kingdom at that time. The ancestors of the Bundjalung nation hunted through the forests all along the rain-sculpted valleys with spear tips fashioned from the abundant agate and chalcedony crystals they found glittering in the creeks and streams. Their culture and the worship of land of their forefathers placed them naturally as predators at the top of the caldera’s food chain. Blending harmoniously into the landscape and its ecological diversity for myriad generations, they revered in particular the giant volcanic plug at its center, which they called ‘Wollumbin ‘, ‘father of the mountains’.

It is in the native heart of the Wollumbin Caldera, in the center of a pristine private wild life sanctuary, established by its parent company Technocratics in 1994, that fingerlimecolours grows its certified organic fruit on a slope overlooking one of the property’s lakes. This is the natural environment of the native finger lime and wild trees grow in the rainforest within a few hundred meters of our orchards.