Plant identification 101

We went for a walk along the track we call Poo Pits 2 yesterday.  The name comes from the fact that the track leaves Genoa Rd and eventually emerges at the Waste Water Treatment Plant (WWTP).  And it's number 2, not because of the link between Number 2s and the WWTP, but because it is the second track in that direction after Watertrust Rd.

We have been monitoring the vegetation along the track for a while since it:

• includes both heath and open woodland; and
• is only about 1km long so can be visited without chewing up too much time.

Our starting point for plant ID (where memory doesn't do the job) is "Wildflowers of the Wilderness Coast" by Joy Greig.  We got our copy from the Mallacoota Visitors Centre.  This is an excellent tome, primarily organised on alphabetic lists of the Latin within habitat types.  The content is a photograph of the flowers of the species with about 60 words covering the features of the plant and an indication of flowering season.  In some cases similar species are also mentioned.

In most cases we could get to genus by relying on memory and pick out the species by looking within the habitat.  In other cases looking up the genus in the scientific names Index got us to the right pages when the genus occurred in several habitat types and it was taking longer than we felt like investing in scanning the guts of the book.

We ended with two plants (with flowers) we couldn't ID.  There were quite a few without flowers we couldn't ID but they were beyond our resources to deal with.  The first was clearly a wattle (Acacia sp) but didn't match any of those in the two main habitat types.

 Confirming the football maxim that "you can beat class but you can't beat arse" on getting home the book fell open at page 37, the start of the Sclerophyll Forest section, and there was A. oxycedrus.  Hakuna matata.

The next one was more tricky.

To begin with it had 6 petals whereas my rule of thumb is that dicotyledonous plants only have 4 or 5 petals.  (Frances has since commented about roses with a squillion petals!)  I scanned the whole book looking for a white flower with a hairy stem and leaves.  Nothing.

So I thought I would try iNaturalist.org as the nice people there had identified a previous difficult species.  All one needs is a photo and a pair of geocoordinates both of which were available.  It returned a set of possibles including Bauera rubioides. The image they had showed a pink flower, as does the book, so I ignored that and entered "no idea" as my potential ID.  The site sent back a message saying "We are quite sure this is Bauera rubioides."  so I looked it up on the Flora of Victoria site.  This refers to the hairy stems and says flowers pink or white.  Bingo.

This tends to confirm the utility of iNaturalist.org as a resource.

I ended with 26 taxa listed of which 4 were sp. as they didn't have flowers but some attribute such as fruit [Leptospermum sp,] or sticky leaves [Drosera sp.] which got me to Genus.

Addendum:

We went to Maxwell's Flora Reserve on 5 August and on the edge of the rain forest found a creeper/vine with an emerging inflorescence which looked interesting, but which I couldn't ID.  So flushed with the success of the Bauera I submitted my photograph ...

.. to iNaturalist.  They came back with a suggestion of Smilax glauca which did not get a match in either Plantnet  (NSW) or Flora of Victoria.  As everything else seemed to match I checked for members of Smilax on those two websites,  Bingo: it is S. australis, familiar to, and hated by bushwalkers as Lawyer Vine (because once it gets its hooks into it never lets go!  So although iNaturalist didn't get 100% it gave me the correct direction to rapidly get the ID.