Casuarinas

There are many uses for Casuarina wood, apart from its utility as an ideal source of fuel. Casuarinas are excellent for landscaping, sandbinding, windbreaks in agroforestry and, above all, for rural house construction requiring inexpensive wood. Casuarinas are regarded as multipurpose trees, requiring no special chemical inputs or agronomic practices to raise large plantations on a slender budget. Interest in the use of casuarinas as multipurpose trees is not matched with equal enthusiasm for both fundamental and applied research. This illustrated text has been designed and written to bring home all aspects of the biology, taxonomy, agronomy, uses and economics of cultivation with major emphasis on the microbial associations that make the tree species self-sufficient with regard to nutrient requirements.