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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. |
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