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...
Plant of the Month: Not those blueberries?!
For those of you waiting for the thrilling conclusion of the key to the Eucalypts of the Hunter Region you’ll just have to wait a little longer as I wade through the stringybarks, but I’ll get there, eventually, probably. You may have seen some stories on the Hunter...
Plant of the Month: The Littlest Aliens!
There are times I, and many others, question my sanity, deciding to write up a key to the Eucalypts of the Hunter has been one of those times. It was all going well till I got to the Stringybarks and Mahoganies. I’ve been wading my way through it for the past couple...
Plant of the Month: Red Gums
Last month we looked at the Grey Gums and Blue Gums, this month we’re on to the Red Gums, the defining characteristics for the Red Gums is smooth bark, gumnuts (fruits) with raised discs and exserted valves and the leaves same colour on both sides (concolorous). The...