Plant of the Month: Hey, Xanthorrhoea, it’s always good to see ya!
Plant of the Month: Hey, Xanthorrhoea, it’s always good to see ya! I’ve been around Grass Trees for quite some time, successfully relocating some, collecting seed and propagating, watching them burn more than once and watching them grow and become established. I’m by...
Plant of the Month: Rainforest Pop-Ups
Plant of the Month - Rainforest Pop Ups Regular readers of “The Scoop” will be familiar with the Hunter Rainforest Revival Project and the great work that’s being done to restore some of the lower Hunter’s Rainforest. Most will also be familiar with rainforests as...
Plant of the Month: Not the Landcare Weed!
Plant of the Month - Not the Landcare Weed! Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was at TAFE doing Certificate 2 in Bush Regeneration* the instructor, a well known environmental consultant in the region, would refer to Lomandra longifolia as “the Landcare...
Plant of the Month: Time to Give a Fig
Plant of the Month - Time to Give a Fig But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid; Micah 4:4 I’m generally more for "random musical references" kinda bloke but every now and then I’ll drag out something from...
Plant of the Month: I heard it through the grapevine
To my mind, there’s three kinds of people who read “The Scoop”. There’s those who would have read the title of this month’s Plant of the Month and immediately thought of the late, great Marvin Gaye, there’s those who would have thought of the original version by...
Vine, vine, everywhere a vine
“Climbing over the scenery, breaking my mind…”. Having had a haircut a couple of weeks ago I don’t currently fit the category of “long haired freaky people” (or person) but I am reasonably good at reading the vines. Ok Paul, cut it with the random 70’s musical...
Plant of the Month – By Gum, That’s It!
Finally, the column you’ve all been waiting for, the last of the Eucalypt keys. Now all I have to do is put them all together, rewrite them so it’s all a fairly standard format and get more photos. Sigh! Obviously I’ll have made a few errors and things may not be...
Stringybarks, Part 2. The madness continues!
So, did you manage to survive the last Plant of the Month? Slightly more manageable this time, still working on the full barks but the adult leaves are discolorous, that is, they’re different colours, or at least distinctly different shades, on each side. Eucalyptus...
It’s here, finally! Keys to the Stringybarks (Part 1)
Ok, first off I apologise for how long this has taken, if I’d known just how epic an undertaking developing a key to the Region’s stringybarks was I’d never have attempted it, and secondly apologies for the lack of pics, that will be an even more epic task getting...
Plant of the Month: Bolwarra
Plant of the Month: Not Just a Suburb in Maitland We’ve previously discussed plants named after locations but there’s also plenty of locations named after plants, there’s Geebung in Bris-Vegas, Glossodia in Sydney, Bungwahl up on Myall Lake and locally we have...
Plant of the Month: Great Uncle Blue
Looking through the back issues so I’m not repeating myself, I can only find one short mention of Red Cedar. Given its role in the European colonisation of the east coast it’s a fairly major miss by me, so here goes. My first introduction to Red Cedar was around half...
Plant of the Month: Call me Ishmael
"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the...