As an insight into the indigenous plants to be found across greater Melbourne, Flora of Melbourne has never been rivalled. Conceived more than 30 years ago and first published in 1991, the book revealed to us the great diversity of all that once grew – sometimes still does – in Doncaster as opposed to the Dandenongs, or Mitcham rather than Moorooduc. With its discussion of soils, climate and the other (both natural and man-made) factors influencing the spread of plants, the book has become only more relevant as the city has continued to grow, with its fourth – revised and much expanded – edition launched last weekend.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Neville Walsh, senior conservation botanist at Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens, who wrote the book’s foreword, describes the whole endeavour as “trying to pin down a moving target”.
Urban growth, weed incursion and climate change continuously ring in the changes. The last remaining Grevillea sp. aff. rosmarinifolia growing by the road in Lara perished when a truckload of metal was deposited atop it. In the increasingly developed St Albans the once-prevalent orchid Diuris fragrantissima is down to no more than six plants, while another two orchid species have disappeared from Frankston. The tree form of Banksia marginata, a once-common feature (according to early surveying reports) in such places as Altona, Collingwood and Essendon, is now critically endangered in Melbourne and reduced to two trees at Plenty Gorge and up to 40 in Warrandyte.
It’s not all bad news though and, sometimes, plants thought to have been lost have been spotted afresh. Calandrinia eremaea, for example, was recorded as extinct at Yarra Bend in the first two editions but, thanks to the removal of weed grasses, has now reappeared.
Such is the book’s reputation that enthusiasts from all over Melbourne have taken to playing sleuth. Local councils have given Marilyn Bull, author of the latest edition, access to their species lists and habitat descriptions, while botanists and other experts have provided her with other research. This is fitting for a book that has always relied on collaboration.
It was in 1984 that John Knight, a member of the Australian Plants Society Maroondah, had the idea for a text that rectified the then dearth of information on Melbourne’s indigenous plants. He, Bull and other members set about producing a guide outlining 200 indigenous species suitable for home gardens.
The only trouble was no one could agree on what plants would make the cut, so it was finally decided to include them all. After trawling through the pressed collection at the Melbourne Herbarium, texts at the State Library, unpublished species lists drawn up by botanists and field notes published over 50 years in Victorian Naturalist, and after personally examining the flora in landscapes across Melbourne, they came up with 1100 species.
Details about the plants’ forms, requirements and localities (including those from which it had become extinct) were accompanied by intricate line drawings, mostly by George Stolfo. The idea was to give readers – everyone from home gardeners to botanists – an idea of both the vegetation that was to be found in the past and what grows now.
“There was very little information about indigenous plants at that time, there weren’t all the friends groups or the ecologists working for councils,” Bull says.
“We wanted to encourage people to understand their own distinct area and to plant for that.”
Two thousand copies of the original book were printed, and sold out within six months. Within two years another edition had been printed.
The latest edition covers 1360 species and forms and is largely the work of Bull, who grew up with a backyard full of exotics but had her head turned by Australian plants in her 20s, and Stolfo, an architect with a gift for drawing native plants.
Bull, has revised the entire text from the third edition published in 2001, photographed many of the species (for the first time there are photographs alongside Stolfo’s drawings) and co-ordinated new contributions.
She kept abreast of every name change, right down to the tiny carnivorous herbs known as bladderworts (Utricularia), for which – a week before the manuscript went to the printers – she was alerted to a recently separated species occurring in Wantirna and Langwarrin. While she got that development into the book, such is the nature of both taxonomic research and our ever-changing landscape that Bull says Flora of Melbourne would already be different if it were going to the printer again tomorrow.
Flora of Melbourne, Hyland House Publishing, $89.95
