Oz Flora

Australian plants, and how they cope with growing in the wide brown land.

There are a lot of plants that are unique to Australia, and a lot of these have characteristics not seen anywhere else. These are due mostly to the harsh environments in which the plants have to survive, and have evolved over many millions of years.

The best known Aussie plant is the eucalyptus, or gum tree. These come in many varieties, and various species have adapted to be able to grow in snowbound alpine environments, costal plains or the sandy deserts. Eucalyptus trees are evergreen, and all have a similar leaf colour, that looks a bit like aqua. Gum trees have their seeds in gumnuts, which are very hard marble sized nuts contining the trees seeds.

Many Ozzie flowers have evolved uncommon shapes to keep a competitive edge in attracting insects. Examples of these are:

The Bottlebrush, whose flower is shaped like, well, a bottle brush. When the flowers of these die and fall off, a furry cylinder contining lots of seed pods is left over.
The Warratah, whose flower is an onion shaped ball made up of lots of little coloured finger petals (like those of the bottlebrush) and surrounded by leaves.
The Kangaroo Paw, which has three petals per flower in the rough shape of a Kangaroo's paw (long center petal with shorter side petals).
The Wattle, a flowering tree whose flowers are made up of many hair - thin fingers of petal that sprout from a woody cone. These are the first flowers to appear in spring, and are a brilliant yellow. Eucalypt flowers are similar, and both leave seed bearing pods when the flowers die off.

Other Oz plants include rainforest palms, ferns, mosses and lichens, bush shrubs like the Teatree, alpine, plain and desert grasses.

Another uncommon Australian tree is the Mangrove tree, which is apparently the only known tree that can grow in salt water. Mangrove trees form Mangrove swamps, where the mud and water surrounding the exposed roots of the trees from a unique and rare eco - system.

One of the ways that plants have adapted to the harsh conditions is by depending on fire for new growth spurts. Gumnuts and other seed enclosures can be opened only by the heat of a bushfire, and many grasses also need fire to seed. The eucalyptus oil in gum trees is highly flammable, allowing the old leaves to burn off and leaving room for new branches. Eucalyptus bark is designed to lead flames up the tree's trunk to the leaves.