If there’s one Tasmanian plant that could be called the life of the party, it’s the fagus.

The beautiful fagus has become such a popular part of Tasmanian folklore that there are now fagus crafts and jewellery, fagus helicopter tours, fagus-infused products like gin, and even a fagus festival at Cradle Mountain.

You might call it the little tree that could.

Also known by its scientific name Nothofagus gunnii, fagus is a compact deciduous alpine beech tree with small oval-shaped leaves. It has grown in Tasmania for 40 million years.

According to Parks and Wildlife Tasmania, fagus is a paleoendemic species of a Gondwanan group, and there are similar species of beech tree in New Zealand and South America. It goes by the name fagus, but it’s also called deciduous beech and “tanglefoot”—because it grows close to the ground and gets tangled up the feet of bushwalkers.

Fagus has been called a "winter-deciduous" plant—in fact, it's one of only a handful of deciduous plants in Australia—so it comes alive with colour in late April and early May. It’s a period that Tasmanians have come to call the “Turning of the Fagus”. Its small crinkly leaves, which look a lot like potato chips, turn bright yellow then orange then red (some even become a rich claret colour), and the plant covers huge swaths of the wilderness making for quite a show. Bushwalkers have been known to come around a corner in Tasmania and be overwhelmed by the beauty the fagus cover.

The best places to see fagus are on the flanks of Cradle Mountain, around Lake St Clair, in the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park, in Mount Field National Park, and in Southwest National Park. It’s worth a visit to any of these places for one of the great colour displays in Australia.

To be sure Tasmania is home to some stupendous vegetation. The state is also home to some of the most ancient plant species on earth, including King's Holly (estimated to be at least 43,000 years old), the world's tallest flowering tree, the giant ash, and many beautiful small plants such as terrestrial orchids.

And while fagus isn’t as famous as its Tasmanian cousins like the Huon pine or the King Billy pine, it’s far more colorful and will brighten up any journey in the Tasmanian bush, especially one that’s required an all-day, thigh-busting tramp.