Native Plants for New South Wales Native Plants for New South Wales
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NativeNative PlantsPlants forfor NewNew SouthSouth WalesWales $$55..0000 Journal of the Australian Plants Society NSWNative Ltd VolPlants 50 April No 2015 2 April — Page 2015 1 Contents Introduction ...................................... 3 Fire! Fire! Part 1............................... 4 Native Plants for NSW What’s on your head? APS hats ......9 Published quarterly in January, April, July and October by the Australian Plants Society NSW How to rescue a pot-bound plant... 10 Ltd ACN 002 680 408 If only I weren’t a Zieria ................. 16 Editor: David Crawford May gathering & AGM ................... 20 Proof Reading: Rhonda Daniels 2015 ANPSA Conference .............. 21 Jan Douglas Layout: Lachlan McLaine Pools to Ponds March gathering .... 22 ANPSA Website ............................. 24 The Journal is a forum for the exchange of views of members and others and their Coates Wildlife Tours .....................26 experiences of propagating, conserving and 2015 APS NSW AGM .................... 27 gardening with Australian plants. Inverawe Gardens ......................... 27 Contributions are warmly welcomed. They may be emailed, typed or hand written and New members ............................... 28 accompanied by photographs and drawings. If handwritten, please print botanical names and District Group directory ..................29 names of people. Membership form........................... 30 Photographs may be submitted as either high District Group directory continued ... 32 resolution digital ¿ les, such as jpg, or prints. APS NSW Bequest Fund grants.... 33 APS NSW Of¿ ce Mail: PO Box 5026 Vice Presidents’ report................... 33 Old Toongabbie NSW 2146 Seed Bank Annual List .................. 34 Phone: (02) 9631 4085 Email: of¿ [email protected] Conservation Report...................... 36 Website: www.austplants.com.au Facebook: www.facebook.com/APSNSW APS NSW 2015 Get-together ........38 Get-together Registration form ...... 41 Deadline for the July 2015 issue is 1 June 2015. FJC Rogers Seminar 2014 ............ 42 Burrendong 50th anniversary ....... 46 Deadline for the October 2015 issue is 1 September 2015. Goulburn Wetlands ........................48 All original text may be reprinted, unless Study Groups notes .......................51 otherwise indicated, provided the source is Study Groups directory ..................56 acknowledged. Permission to reprint non- original material, all drawings and images Membership discounts................... 58 must be obtained from the copyright holder. APS NSW contacts, Opinions expressed in this publication are committees and services ............ 59 those of the authors and may not necessarily represent the of¿ cial policy of the Australian Plants Society NSW Ltd. Front cover: Swainsona formosa. Photo by Number of Copies: 1400 Carol Drew of East Hills Group. Printed: Elect Printing, Fyshwick ACT. Back cover: Mass À owering of Sydney Red Gum (Angophora costata). Photo by Carol Print Post Approved: 100000848 Drew of East Hills Group. © 2015 ISSN 1323 – 7314 See page 55 for more information. Page 2 — Native Plants April 2015 Introduction David Crawford, Editor Native Plants for NSW A year or so ago some members were advocating that Native Plants for NSW should be available in electronic form. The Board looked into the practicalities of such a change and decided that print was the preferred option at least for the short term. Members can however read this newsletter on the APS NSW website – www. austplants.com.au. A pdf version is generally available before the hard copy is printed or distributed, so if there are production delays you don’t have to wait. This option has been available for about one year now, but I am advised that very few members have used it. Perhaps you are not aware of it, or the push for electronic format was not widespread? This is a bumper issue. Again the articles are varied in style and content, hopefully reÀ ecting the diversity of members’ interests and providing some items of appeal to all members. Fire is a perennial factor in the Australian landscape. In this issue we begin a series of articles by Gwyn Clarke of Coffs Harbour Group, giving ¿ rst-hand experience of designing a garden and house for ¿ re protection, experiencing bush¿ re, and recovery after the devastation. See page 4 to start the journey. In the January 2015 issue I asked members to nominate their favourite websites for native plants. Alas, I have not received any feedback at all! This is very discouraging. Perhaps I was wrong and members are not using the internet to explore the ‘world of native plants’? Can this be true? Please give my request some thought and make a contribution for later issues. In the meantime, Brian Walters, who manages the ANPSA website, has written a timely article to mark 20 years online (p 24). I hope his article will encourage more members to make use of this great resource that has grown out of our Society. Events that members need to be aware of include the May gathering and NSW AGM to be held in southern Sydney (p 20), the 2015 NSW Get-together in the Blue Mountains (p 41) and the biennial national conference in Canberra later in the year (p 22). For this issue the cover images are by Carol Drew, a member of the East Hills Group. Native Plants for NSW is your newsletter: members’ contributions – images and articles – can only make it better and more relevant for us all. Native Plants April 2015 — Page 3 FIRE! FIRE! Part 1 Gwyn Clarke, Coffs Harbour Group Gwyn and Geoff Clarke live on a property on the back road between Coffs Harbour and Grafton. They love the Australian bush but they know its greatest hazard, ¿ re. They designed their house and garden with a love of native plants and the need to ensure safety and survival. Last year that design was put to the test. This is the ¿ rst of three articles about their experience. Those to follow will cover the ¿ re and its immediate effects and ¿ nally the recovery of the garden and regeneration of the bush. Ominous smoke clouds billowed into the sky over the forest in the south east. There was a light breeze from the same direction but it was quite a cool late winter’s morning, Saturday 2 August 2014 to be exact. The forecast temperature was 19°C but the ¿ re danger rating was very high because of the extreme dryness. Geoff and I walked back up the hill at the end of our morning’s walk. Would the ¿ re come our way today, should we take what we had planned and leave, or should we prepare to stay and ¿ ght? Our bush¿ re plan was to stay unless the ¿ re danger was extreme or catastrophic in which case we would leave a day earlier. We always knew that one day it would come to this but you never really feel totally prepared and I was certainly feeling apprehensive. We bought our 40 hectares of dry sclerophyll forest and woodland in 1985. There was a shabby, dusty photo in a real estate agent’s window in Coffs Harbour. It looked like a large rock garden with ferns, grasstrees and huge lilies scattered through the rocks. We wanted to see it, so the agent provided us with a map of the subdivision, and told us how to get there. The rest was up to us. Fortunately he gave good instructions. Of course it didn’t all look like the photo and we had looked at quite a few blocks before we found the one where the photo had been taken. The block itself had many different aspects, some areas were level some steep and rocky. This meant that the À ora on it was diverse. How could we resist? We always knew it would be ¿ re-prone, both of us having lived near sandstone areas in our youth. At the time we bought the block bad ¿ res in this area occurred at around 50 year intervals (the last one from the south west in 1983), often in late spring as this is the driest time here. Our summer is usually wet. Times change though, and the advent of more people living in the area on blocks of between 40 and 80 hectares and the changing of the climate means more ¿ res. Usually these have been burn offs which have got away in the rugged gullies here. Page 4 — Native Plants April 2015 For many years it was just used as a holiday retreat. The good thing about it was that there were no weeds to worry about and control, and there were lots of interesting plants. The big lily from the photo turned out to be Doryanthes excelsa, which was rather a surprise to us as at that time it had only been recorded as far north as the Newcastle area. We found Boronia rosmarinifolia now B. hapalophylla and an unknown Dodonaea which has recently been named D. crucifolia. There was Ricinocarpus pinifolius with its showy white À owers and strange greenish pom-poms (female À owers). There were ¿ ve different banksias, lots of different peas and amazing number of small plants to identify, but best of all Actinotus helianthi. We’d always wanted to grow À annel À owers but pot culture was the best we could manage in our former home in Canberra. We now have a plant list and never seem to have ¿ nished adding to it. It was great in winter because it was much warmer than Canberra and we enjoyed sharing it with friends and family. It was always our intention to build a home here for our retirement but we kept putting it off. Our grandchildren and then travelling got in the way. The day dawned when we realised that if we didn’t do it soon it would never happen. In 2009 we left Canberra which had been through a major bush¿ re in 2003, and was suffering from a long drought, for the much warmer and wetter north coast of NSW.