Considerable height and more or less erect form will place the species in the forest or woodland tree category, many stems define the mallee habit, and green crowns invariably indicate the adult growth stage (compare with glaucous crowns, e.g. E. cinerea, which usually indicates juvenile leaves making up the mature canopy). These are the obvious features that confront the viewer first up. Yet there are several hundred species of erect forest trees, and in the regrowth of a tree following fire or some other form of destruction, it may take years for the typical form to be manifest. There are more than a hundred mallee species and most species have green crowns of adult leaves. We consider these characters to be of low reliability. Therefore in the identification process one has to look further and much more deeply at the whole plant and its very numerous characters.

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