Tasmanian Plants

In my virgin days of botanizing, my eyes were glued on flowers. Flowers in the sense of trees, shrubs, twinners, lilies, irises, orchids, etc. These are beautiful, often showy, and definitely attention grabbing.

I was certainly not unique in my biasness.

On the naturalist front for example, there are many whose passions seem to revolve around particular group of flowers.

Orchids appear to be one such group. Practically every spring there will be courses or fieldtrips held in obeisance of orchids.

Then also, there is the annually held Springflower Spectacular, a public springflower show in the Hobart Town hall, where a smörgåsbord of native banksias, boronias, daisies, heaths, peaflowers, waratahs etc are displayed.

Always this ridiculous obsession with flowers!

But misunderstand me not.

The motive of this writing is not to marginalize flowers, but to exalt them.

In all the time I have been looking at plants I  have yet to find a single flower that does not personify beauty. I am merely believing that an attention only to showiness and colour is myopic.

Admit we must, that most of us have cared little to appreciate a certain group of flowers ― the grasses and their inconspicuously-flowered kin. By these I am referring to sedges (Cyperaceae), rushes (Juncaceae), cord rushes (Restionaceae), bristleworts (Centrolepidaceae), waterribbons (Juncaginaceae) and any others that fit the  the bill.

So while roses, tulips, orchids and lilies are most often the subject of poetic adoration, I have come to absolutely adore the oft-quoted phrase from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:

‘I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.‘

The diversity of overall form in grasses and their kin is staggering.

They can grow as turfs or tussocks, as creepers or sprawlers. They can be messy or elegant. They can manifest as towering forms inspiring awe from the tallest of man (eg Cortaderia, Phragmites) or invoke adoration as minute annuals barely reaching a few centimeters (some Isolepis, Juncus etc).

But the true artistic genius of grasses and their kin lie in their flowers.

Grasses and their kin have flowers born in spikes, panicles or racemes, their spikelets displaying a bewildering configuration of shapes, sizes and orientations. When we finally get down to the actual flowers, we find that petals are simply not their style. They prefer the pragmatism of well hung stamens and plumed feathery stigmas that captures the love in the wind. Yet, unadorned as they are, their finesse is extreme, and their strategy hugely successful.

They are found from the edges of the sea to the tops of the mountains, in dryland, wetland, forest and scrub.

Where grasses occur in natural assemblages abundant enough to be the most dominant group of plants, they form grasslands. As an ecosystem, grasslands are richly diverse, supporting a wide range of invertebrates, birds and other plants. Many of Tasmania’s rare plants occur in grasslands. Such is the irony that we make annual pilgrimages to grasslands to look for orchids.

A ramble in a grassland evokes an inexplicable feeling in me. My mind conjures up a time when man has a primal connection with grassy, savanna-like environments. I can sense that the evolutionary journey of man and that of grasses and grass-like plants were always linked in some inextricable way. We eat of their substance. We weave of their resilience. As a whole, few plants groups has had as great an impact on man as grasses and their kin. I’d go as far as to say that the  form of grasses and their kin is etched into our psyche.

My journey has brought me to a point where I am thoroughly smittened with grasses and the like, just as I have become smittened with various other plant groups. I imagine this is the natural and inexorable progression of anyone who is assiduously and incessantly in search of more to appreciate. I know that until I fully expend my capacity to see and know all that I can see and know, my appreciation of this vast plant world can never be complete. And therein lies the joy of botany.

The weather on Monday (26 Oct 2009) was so nice and balmy today that despite having a splitting headache I chose to go for a short walk.

Having, in my absent mindedness forgotten how to get to the Knocklofty Park entrance, I settled for a short walk at the Leonard Wall – Valley Street Reserve.

The small reserve is relatively new and was erected in 2003 in memory of the well known ornithologist Leonard Ernst Wall (1921-2004).

The first impression of the place was that it is overun with weeds. Particularly prominet was the Meadow Foxtail (Alopecurus pratensis). This was the first time I’ve ever seen so much of this grass growing in one place. However, it is obvious that there have been some efforts to plant native species on the slopes of the reserve.

In all, I counted at least 32 species of weeds and 30 native species there (See checklist).

The highlight of my short walk must have been an old and imposing Blue Gum (Eucalyptus globulus) tree at the top of the reserve. It had ramified trunk right near the base and each trunk had a girth of say, over 2 meters. In the aerial photograph in the checklist page, the crown of this tree can be seen to cover a significant portion of the small reserve.

By the size alone I doubt this Blue Gum was planted. If it was it must have been planted about a century ago. I imagine the tree must be a remnant of old Hobart, and has borne silent witness to all the changes that have taken place for the past century.

What would such trees say if we could hear?

It is common knowledge that the grassland ecosystem is one of high botanical biodiversity. Even disturbed grasslands can have a rather high diversity of a mixed bag of native and exotic plants.

Whilst strolling along the side of a 300m stretch of road in the Queens domain I decided to do an amateur-naturalist survey.

I took the road as an informal transect and count the number of grass genera that I could discern along that 300 m stretch, just on the side of the road I was walking.

I collected some of the grass and laid them out to photograph, as shown below.

Here are some of my results of the impromptu identifications, with the numbers corresponding to the genus identity of the grasses in the photograph:

1. Greater Quaking-grass (Briza maxima)
2. Lesser Quaking-grass (Briza minor)
3. Poa bulbosa
4. Sweetgrass (Glyceria sp.)
5. Silvery Hairgrass (Aira caryophyllea)
6. Poa sp.
7. Fescue (Festuca sp.)
8. Cocksfoot (Dactylis glomerata)
9. Kangaroo grass (Themeda triandra)
10. Speargrass (Austrostipa sp.)
11. unknown sp.
12. Loose Plumegrass (Dichelachne inaequiglumis)
13. Rice millet (Piptatherum miliaceum)
14. Great Brome (Bromus diandrus)
15. Ratstail Fescue (Vulpia myuros)
16. Bearded Oat (Avena barbata)
17. Sweet Vernalgrass (Anthoxanthum odoratum)

Although only 17 species are featured in the photograph, there is not a shadow of doubt that I have missed quite a few species.

For example, there were definitely more than two species of Speargrass (Austrostipa) and a few other more genera that I had seen previously when walking along that road.

Nevertheless, just on the basis of what I have collected and laid out there are at least 14 genera of grasses, all just on one side of a 300m stretch of road!

Such richness!

For a fan of biodiversity (weedy or not) and of grasses, a ramble around such a grassland in springtime is simply irresistible.

I was up at the peak of the Queen’s Domain almost a month ago on the 29th of March when I came across an odd looking grass right in the midst of flowering.

While I don’t claim to know anywhere close to all the grass species in Tasmania, I am familiar with the gist of many of the genera. However, this specimen didn’t look like any grass genus in Tasmania that I could place a finger on.

The closest thing the spikelets reminded me of was another weedy grass in the genus Paspalum but the structure of the inflorescence was totally wrong.

I tried keying it out with the Curtis-Morris Student’s Flora Volume 5 to no avail.

I needed the expertise of a master, which is when I deferred to maestro Greg Jordan.

As I threw my hands up in surrender he whipped out his treasured tome  – the $250 Flora of Victoria Vol. 2. We were going to consult this tome.

Learning the nitty gritty of grasses can be quite an involved process, requiring an attention to inconspicuous and reading lines of esoteric sounding jargon for floral parts (e.g, glumes, lemmas, paleas, etc), but that really is part of the fun.

Initially, our efforts at keying the species out seemed to go nowhere. We ended up at various other species which do not look one bit like our mystery plant.

Then when we were about to give up Greg noticed an awn (a bristle-like appendage) sticking out from one of the spikelets.

And then it was as if an embolism popped.

While our mystery plant was slightly less adorned in the awns as it might normally be, it keyed out easily to Sorghum halepense (Johnson grass), an African native.

I have seen Sorghum grasses before but I didn’t make the connection for this one as I had previously only seen Sorghum in a mature state, with their attractive voluptuous pearly seeds.

Sorghum halepense is recorded in Victoria as a weed although at this stage I am not sure if it has spread beyond the Domain in Tasmania. There was just maybe one or two clumps of it and I reckoned that it hitchhiked on the tyres of an automobile (probably from mainland Australia).

Weed or no, Sorghum halepense is a very attractive grass with panicles full of crimson-tinged spikelets and exquisitely bold feathery stigmas.

I’ll be back again for a rendezvous with it next year.