FREESIA

(Freesia cultivar)

(Photos: C. Schultz, a single flower, and a small clump with lots of buds at Cape Jervis)

This scented South African garden plant is now naturalised in many areas of bushland in South Australia. You won’t see it just yet though. Dormant over summer, the underground corms (bulbs) are waiting for winter-spring, when the soft, pale green leaves appear. These individually are flat, but together form a fan shape. The flowering stem can grow to about 40 cm, with kinks just before each of the flowers. The kinks give the flower head a look like a pan flute! The 6 ‘petals’ of the flowers are 3-5mm long, fused together at the base. In the bushland runaways, these petals are normally a creamy white, with possible hints of purple. Modern hybrid cultivars often come in many other colours but are not as scented though.

COMMON STORKS BILL

(Erodium cicutarium)

(Photos: E. Cousins, plant, close-up of flower; Cape Jervis. http://www.cabi.org/isc/datasheet/21843 ripe fruit )

Shin high, with deeply divided leaves, this weed loves disturbed or arid sites. There it will outcompete native plants. The annual weed has a rosette of deep green leaves at the base, which might produce a bit of stem as it grows older.  From the basal leaf rosette, slender stalks grow, supporting a small cluster of flowers. The flowers are 5-petalled and pink, each petal roughly elliptic in shape, 4-6mm long.

It is the long seed pods though that give the plant its common name. These grow as a ‘beak’ 3-4 cm long. As they ripen and dry, they twist to produce the corkscrew seen in the photo on the right. At this stage the feathery seeds are released into the air. Another Erodium, with the common name of Long Storks Bill, produces a beak up to 10cm long!

AUSTRALIAN BROOMRAPE

(Orobanche cernua var. australiana)

(Photos: E. Cousins, a single stem, close-up of a flower head; Cape Jervis)

When we saw these at Cape Jervis in early December, the plants were just starting to set seed, in what looked like little parcels of fine brown grit. Looking at the stem in the first photo, you can imagine what the plant looks like before the flowers appear: an asparagus stalk! Unlike asparagus though, these stems are covered in tubular purple flowers, each with leaves at their base (those brown flaps). Notice there is no green at all in the plant (stem, flowers OR leaves)! This isn’t because it is an old plant or anything, but because the plant is parasitic, relying on nearby plants for food. Although rare in SA, the patches we found were healthy and fairly extensive. Maybe this is because the adjacent Senecio host plants were also abundant and flourishing this year, after all those early rains!!

WEDGE-LEAVED POMADERRIS

(Pomaderris obcordata)

(Photos : E. Cousins, foliage, C. Schultz, flower head; at Cape Jervis)

This bushy shrub lives up to its name…or its name lives up to it! The leaves have a definite indentation at their tips, giving them a heart or wedge shape. The leaves are smooth, as you can see in the photo. What you can’t see is that they are hairy underneath. The star shaped flowers occur in dense little clusters, and are obviously very attractive to ants (see second photo above)!!! While the flower heads are whitish, the seed heads are blackish. These shrubs like the sand and limestone of the coast, but are still rare around the Fleurieu.  In fact, this is the only plant we know of and unfortunately no seed formed this year.

 WHITE FUMITORY

(Fumaria capreolata)(Photos: E. Cousins, plant; close-up of flower head)

This scrambling weed is found in damp soils along creek banks, etc. Its soft, hairless foliage is heavily lobed (a bit like flat parsley leaves in shape, and maidenhair fern in softness). The droopy flowers are tubular, clustered on a large bract. Each flower is white, tipped with a distinctive purple-red blotch. About 3 weeks after the first flowers appear, seeds are already maturing. These can stay viable for years: 3-5 years if they remain in the top 5 cm of soil, but up to 20 years if they have been carried 15cm down e.g. by ants or soil disturbance.

ONE-SIDED CREAMY CANDLES

(Stackhousia aspericocca ssp. one-sided inflorescence)

(Photos : E. Cousins, a patch at Cape Jervis; C. Schultz, close-up of flower & bracts)

We were lucky enough to see these flowering beautifully in a remnant vegetation patch at Cape Jervis in late September. The bright green patches attracted our attention from quite a distance away, even though the leaves are only about 30cm long. The flower spikes do stand quite a bit higher, with yellow flowers on just one side, as the name suggests. These flowers are tubular with 5 little lobes at the top, and a conspicuous green bract plus two smaller ones at the flower base. We have often seen a different version of creamy candles, one with creamy-white flowers all around the stem, but this was the first time we had seen these ones. Very pretty!

GUILFORD GRASS

(Romulea rosea)

(Photos: E. Cousins, a 10cm plant, close-up of 15mm flower; Cape Jervis)

These little weeds grow from small perennial corms. In late autumn they produce smooth, cylindrical, wiry, bright green leaves which are followed til November by the flowers. Each star-shaped flower has its own stem from the base, like the leaves.  The short-lived flowers are 6-petalled, pale pink-purple with a short yellow tube at the centre. Plants die off in summer heat, when roots pull the corms further underground to survive the surface heat til the following year. Pigs will eat the corms, but otherwise the plant has no fodder value. It can take over a lawn in just a few seasons. This is not really a grass as the common name would suggest; that name is from the fact that heavy infestations occurred around Guilford, WA. The botanical name is from Romulus, one of the founders of Rome…a bit international, given the plant is originally from South Africa!

HOTTENTOT FIG

(Carpobrotus edulis)

(Photos: C. Schultz, Cape Jervis, Yellow flowers, ‘teeth’ on leaves and possible hybrid flower)

At first glance, you might think this groundcover is our native pigface, Karkalla. There is that triangular cross-section of the succulent leaves,but this one has ‘teeth’, or a rough edge, to the sharper side, whereas Karkalla is smooth. Its large yellow flowers are the biggest giveaway to its identification though. Unlike our local pink-flowered pigface, this is an invasive introduced species …in fact, it is so invasive it is listed in the Invasive Species Database for 24 countries! Unfortunately, the plant hybridizes with the local pigfaces, where they come into close proximity, and this leads to other problems e.g. swamping local species genetically. One particular concern is that Karkalla is a food source. Although the hottentot fig is also edible, what happens with the hybrids?

KARKALLA
(Carpobrotus rossii)

(Photos : C. Schultz)

This S.A. member of the pigface family is probably well-known to you all. The triangular cross-section of the succulent leaves is a bit of a giveaway, as are those bright pink flowers you see standing out on the edges of sandy beaches. You might notice a difference in some flowers. This is because there are both male and female forms. The male form at up to 6 cm across is larger than the female one, and has stigmas fused into a central column. The stigmas of the female flower, though, are open and recurved in the centre. As well as binding sandy soil the plant has other uses: the fruit and leaves were an indigenous food source, and the juice from those fleshy leaves has been used to soothe problems such as blisters, burns and stings…even scurvy! Way to go, Karkalla!!

SMALL-FLOWERED MARSHMALLOW

(Malva parviflora)

(Photos: E. Cousins, clumps along roadside, close-up of leaf; Cape Jervis)

Originally from the Mediterranean, this weed is now widespread around Australia. It likes disturbed sites such as the roadside pictured above, or vacant urban blocks. Around Cape Jervis, it grows up to about 50cm tall, but can grow to 150cm in other, more hospitable areas. The leaves look a little like those of geraniums and can be much the same size, up to 9cm. They have 5-7 lobes, have rounded teeth around the margins, and pronounced ribs underneath. You can’t see them in the photo above, but there are fine hairs on the leaves. Clusters of small (1cm) pink flowers will appear at leaf junctions. Fruits, also small, dry to brown segments. The weeds at Cape Jervis weren’t flowering when the photos were taken, but with so many plants around you probably won’t have much trouble finding some to look for flowers and fruit yourself!