Happy Wattle Day! An Acacia alphabet.

Today, 1 September, is (semi-officially) at least Wattle Day in Australia. It has been celebrated sporadically from the earlier days of our colonisation, as part of a growing sense of identity and even independence. It's a day whose significance has ebbed and flowed over the years; at present there's something of a minor movement to raise its significance again, but it has no formal recognition. From time to time the suggestion arises that it would be a desirable alternative to the current date, 26 January, for 'Australia Day', our official national day, which commemorates the raising of the British flag on land occupied by indigenous Australians. This is a divisive anniversary, especially among the descendants of those deposed original inhabitants. Wattle Day would be a presumably non-controversial alternative but it's safe to say that the transition won't be happening any time soon.

Hill's Tabletop Wattle Acacia hilliana carpeting the Great Sandy Desert, Western Australia.

Jam Wattle A. acuminata, Christmas Rock, south-western Western Australia.
The cut wood really smells like raspberry jam!

1 September is officially also the start of spring here; for reasons I can't readily explain, Australia uses the agreed Meteorological definition of the seasons, which sets the change of season at the first of September (and December, March and June), while Europe and North America use the Astronomical definition, which uses the equinoxes and solstices to mark the start of the season. Neither of course is 'right' or 'wrong', both are are more or less arbitrary human conceits. There are good reasons to define the seasons by what's actually happening, as many societies have done, and as some Australian indigenous communities (such as in the Top End) still do. For instance clear signs of spring around here to me include the appearance of the first Blue Finger Orchids Cyanicula (or Caladenia) caerulea, the raucous arrival of migratory Noisy Friarbirds, or the day that the Grey Shrike-thrushes abandon their single note winter call and resume their glorious spring/summer serenade. 

This would of course mean that the dates would change from year to year, and while that seems perfectly reasonable to me, I'm realistic enough to know that it's not going to happen!

Meantime, I'd like to celebrate Wattle Day with an alphabet of acacias - or as near as I can get to providing a photo of a species for each letter of the alphabet. With close to 1000 Australian species recognised it shouldn't have been an impossible task, but I didn't quite make it. I failed on J (there are actually quite a few, but I've not met them), N (though there are some, including the type species), Q (there are five, but I can only offer one which at least contains a Q!), and X (there are five), Y (three exist) and Z (of which there is just one). Not too bad though I reckon. In a couple of places I've been unable to pick just one - I hope you can cope in those situations... Lastly, I've tried to select wattles that might be less familiar to most people.

A. acradenia, Great Sandy Desert. This one grows across dry northern Australia.

A. brownii, Goonoo Forest near Dubbo, central west New South Wales.
Named for the great Scottish botanist Robert Brown.

Minnieritchie A. cyperophylla, near Mount Magnet, central Western Australia.
The common name refers to the bark type; this striking species is found scattered across the
middle latitudes of arid Australia.

Showy Wattle A. decora, above and below, Goobang NP, central western New South Wales.

Cerdar Wattle A. elata.Unlike most of the wattles featured here, Cedar Wattle lives in wet forests of the east coast.

Gossamer Wattle A. floribunda, Deua NP, southern New South Wales.
A popular garden plant for its dense blooms, but here in its natural situation.

Early Wattle A. genistifolia, Black Mountain, Canberra.
I love this one, both for its relatively unusual very pale flowers, and because it flowers
in winter, when not much else is doing so in frosty Canberra!
(I've not used many local species here - I'm saving them!)

A. helicophylla, Nitmiluk (Katherine Gorge) NP, Top End of Northern Territory.
This wattle, with the wonderfully twisty phyllodes, is found only on sandstone around
the upper Katherine and Edith Rivers.
I couldn't decide between two 'h' wattles, both with fascinating foliage.

Soapbush Wattle A. holosericea, Cobbold Gorge, central northern Queensland.
The phyllodes are huge - over 20cm long,and up to 10cm wide.
The pods are reputed to remove dirt from the hands if rubbed on the skin; they
(and I think the foliage) certainly contain saponins.

A. ingramii, Dangars Falls, Oxley Wild Rivers NP, near Armidale, northern New South Wales.
This one is restricted to the upper reaches of the Macleay River in the New England area.

I'm not sure why I've not yet met any of the 'j' acacias - there are quite a few. The one I most wish I could introduce you to though is the exquisitely named Acacia jibberdingensis from the Western Australian goldfields.

Witchetty Wattle A. kempeana, near Alice Springs, central Australia.
Named for Pastor Kempe, who founded the Lutheran Mission at Hermannsburg - now the Ntaria Community.
He presumably collected it for Ferdinand von Mueller, who named it.
Indigenous people know that big moth larvae (ie Witchetty Grubs) live in the roots of the plant;
they are an important food source for the desert people.

Sandhill Wattle A. ligulata, Gawler Ranges NP, South Australia.
This wattle is found across inland Australia.
I didn't want to have to decide between two 'l' wattles, so here's another...

Coastal Wattle (or Sydney Golden Wattle around Sydney) A. longifolia, Ulladulla,
south coast New South Wales. This one grows around the coast of south-eastern Australia.

Black Wattle A. mearnsii, Canberra. It is in bud, like here, that it is easiest to see that a
wattle 'flower' is actually a collection of many small clustered flowers.
Sadly this species - common throughout south-eastern Australia - has become an invasive weed
in much of the world.

There are quite a few 'n' acacias, but again I (or at least my camera) have not yet had the pleasure. The first acacia to be named was actually A. nilotica, from Africa, though it has now been put in the genus Vachellia. Perhaps in a balancing-out for the misdeeds of A. mearnsii, nilotica is a serious spiny weed in parts of northern Australia. With regard to natives, one example is A. nanodealbata of central Victoria.

Kata Tjuta Wattle A. olgana, Kata Tjuta, central Australia.
The scientific name refers to the temporary renaming of Kata Tjuta as Mount Olga during the 19th century.
Despite the names, it is found elsewhere in central Australia too.

Prickly Moses A. pulchella, South Beekeepers Nature Reserve, Western Australia, above and below.
This is one of several species bearing this common name, it being a corruption of
'Prickly Mimosa'. This one is endemic to the south-west.

 

Kanji Bush A. inaequilatera, Kata Tjuta. It is found across the central and western deserts.
The name refers to the fact that the vein divides the phyllode unequally.
(There are five actual 'q' wattles, including A. quadrisculata from the Kalbarri area of Western Australia.)

Net-veined Wattle A. retivenea, Bladensburg NP, central Queensland.
Another one with very impressive foliage!

Mudgee Wattle A. spectabilis, Goobang NP, central western New South Wales.
I don't think you can go wrong with a wattle against the sky!
Despite being named for a New South Wales central west town, it is found in much of inland
eastern New South Wales and south-east Queensland.

Yes, another 's'...
Spiny Wattle A. spinescens, Lincoln NP, Eyre Peninsula, South Australia.
The branchlets themselves are stiff and spiky. It is found in dry vegetation across South Australia
to western Victoria.

Spurwing Wattle A. triptera, Goonoo Forest, central west New South Wales.
Another imposingly spiky wattle, this one via stiff pointed phyllodes.
It is found in dry forest and shrubland from Victoria to central Queensland.

Juniper Wattle (also another of those known as Prickly Moses) A. ulicifolia, Deua NP, southern
New South Wales. Another very pale-flowered wattle, found widely in south-eastern Australia.

Elegant, Bramble or Royal Wattle, Bardi Bush, Gundabluey, Narran etc, A. victoriae.I regret not being able to offer a more inspiring picture of this wattle because, scraggly and prickly as it is,
it's one of my favourites. It's ubiquitous across inland Australia and was one of the first species I learnt to
recognise - and it tells me I'm getting into the glorious arid zone.
Despite the 'royal' name alternative, it wasn't named for the queen herself, but the Victoria River, named
and partly explored by Thomas Mitchell in central Queensland in 1845. However it is something of a mystery as it doesn't appear on any modern map. According to Mitchell's map, it arises near the
origins of the Nive and Nogoa Rivers (roughly near Carnarvon Gorge) and flows west, but it
doesn't seem to match any river there. I originally expressed my bafflement here, but not for the first time ANU
scholar David Nash has come to my rescue. He directed me to William Cootes' History of the colony of Queensland from 1770 to the close of the year 1881 : in two volumes. Mitchell was a great believer that there must be a great river
running north-west all the way to the north coast (he even had a name for it, which he ascribed to Aboriginal people
- the Kindur). When he found the Victoria River he was sure this was 'it', though he didn't call it the Kindur!
Later Edmund Kennedy, who had assisted Mitchell on the original expedition, explored further and determined
that the Victoria was in fact an ephemeral stream which ran south-west; any water that ran in it headed
to central Australia via Cooper Creek. Hence Acacia victoriae! Personally I prefer Gundabluey...

A. wilhelmiana, Temora, central western New South Wales.
A mallee and woodland species, mostly from South Australia and south-western New South Wales.
Named for Carl Wilhelmi, a German botanical collector, especially in South Australia, working for von Mueller.

And that's it from me I'm afraid.... There are, surprisingly, five 'x' wattles (including A. xiphophylla from the Pilbara); there are only three 'y's (of which I'd very like to be able to present A. yirrkallensis from Arnhem Land or A. yorkrakinensis from the WA goldfields) and just one 'z', A. zatrichota from the Kimberley.

So, Happy Wattle Day!! But the best news is that, with at least one and usually several wattles flowering on any given day pretty much anywhere you are in Australia, every day can be Wattle Day!

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On This Day, 30 November: Scottish National Day

National days have a very eclectic mix of raisons d'être, with some having apparently fairly nebulous significance. I'm afraid one may see Scotland's National Day, Saint Andrew's Day on 30 November, as being in this category. I feel that I can make the observation as one whose father was born there - my grandfather, a World War One soldier, prisoner of war and survivor, was an electrician in the coal mines, and brought his family out to Adelaide in 1928. 

The connection to Scotland of Andrew, one of the apostles is, at best, vague. It is claimed that a couple of relics associated with him found their way to Scotland, but the two surviving manuscripts, as I understand it, are now in Paris and London. It is said that in 832AD King Óengus mac Fergusa of the Picts (in what is now Scotland) won a battle against the southern Angles after doing a prayer deal with Saint Andrew in which he undertook to make St A the patron saint of Scotland (though Scotland didn't strictly exist at the time), if St A gave him victory. St A kept his side of the bargain, and it's not at all clear what King Óengus did in return. It was only in 2006 that the Scottish parliament officially declared 30 November a bank holiday - but a sort of voluntary one, in that banks only close, and give their employees a holiday, if they feel like it. Moreover, far from having a monopoly on him, Scotland must share Andrew's patron saint favours with Barbados, Greece, Romania, Russia and the Ukraine, as well as assorted towns and regions.

All of which is not very relevant to our main purpose today, which is to celebrate the various Scots whose names are commemorated in the names of Australian plants!

Some of them I've acknowledged before in their own right, so I won't retell their stories here but will refer you to the original posting if you're interested. Perhaps the greatest of them was the remarkable botanist Robert Brown, who sailed with Matthew Flinders on the Investigator, a major scientific expedition beginning in 1801.

Purple Enamel Orchid Elythranthera brunonis, Two Peoples Bay, Western Australia.
'Brunonis' is Latin for brown, and appears for Robert in quite a few Australian names.
It was named by the Austrian botanist Stephan Endlicher in 1839 as Glossodia brunonis,
and the current genus was erected for it by great Western Australian botanist Alex George in 1963.

Charles Fraser, horticulturalist and botanist, was appointed Colonial Botanist of New South Wales by Governor Lachlan Macquarie.

Kapok flowers, Cochlospermum fraseri, family Bixaceae, Timber Creek, Northern Territory.
A common tree of the central and western Australian tropics, it was named to honour Fraser
by French botanist Jules Planchon.

Another Scottish Charles, Charles Moore, was also appointed New South Wales Colonial Botanist, in 1848. 

Macrozamia moorei near Springsure, central Queensland, where it has a very small range.
It was named by the towering figure of late 19th century Australian botany, Ferdinand von Mueller to honour
Moore, who had a strong interest in cycads, in 1881 while Moore was still alive to appreciate the compliment.

And sadly, not all Scots have been universally admired; one such as was the self-aggrandising pioneer of the Murray River steam paddleboat trade, Francis Cadell, who von Mueller also honoured, in this case with a whole genus.

Ooline Cadellia pentastylis, Family Surianaceae, Tregole National Park,
inland south-east Queensland near Morven.
This is another species of limited distribution, the only one of its genus.

But now it's time to meet some Scots whose names appear on Australian plants and who I haven't previously introduced here.

Peter Good was a young man of whom we know sadly little, other than that he was born in Scotland, and worked as a gardener for Earl Wemyss. He was selected by Kew to go to India to bring back a plant collection assembled by the botanist Christopher Smith. On his return he was appointed a foreman at Kew, from where Robert Brown appointed him as assistant on the Investigator expedition. One of his major roles was keeping living plant collections on board, to avoid the problems of getting dried specimens through the tropics. Like many others he contracted dysentery in Timor but continued collecting until he died and was buried with naval honours in Sydney.

Goodia lotifolia, Tallaganda National Park, east of Canberra.
The genus was named for Peter Good by controversial English botanist Richard Salisbury.
(Some of the story of his controversy can be found here.)

A much more highly ranked Scot was John Clements Wickham who served under Lieutenant Phillip Parker King during the first of the British South American Marine Surveys, and was then Second-in-Command of the Beagle during Darwin’s famous voyage. He was responsible for maintaining order in the cramped on-board spaces, and Darwin (known on board as ‘the flycatcher’) and his specimens were a cause of much angst to Wickham, who referred to them as a ‘damn beastly bedvilment’. In fact he told Darwin that ‘if I were skipper I would have you and all your damn mess out of the place’. Darwin on the other hand wrote to his father that Wickham was ‘a glorious fellow’ and it was Wickham who named a bay Port Darwin; later the city took its name from it. In the late 1830s Wickham was back, now in command of the Beagle, charting the Bass Strait Islands and those still uncharted sections of the north-western coasts. His health was ruined, and he left the navy to work as police magistrate at Moreton Bay. When Queensland gained independence in 1860 he retired to the south of France. A more lasting reward was the naming of a widespread and beautiful tropical grevillea for him, by Swiss botanist Carl Meissner.

Grevillea wickhamii (and Grey-headed Honeyeater Ptilotula keartlandi), Kings Canyon, central Australia.

Across the country, Scot James Drummond was appointed to the (honorary!) position of Government Naturalist for the Swan River Colony in its earliest days. He was somewhat desperate, having been made redundant from his post as curator of Cork Botanic Gardens when the British Government withdrew funding, and was led to believe that if a public gardens was to be opened, he could expect a paid job. It didn't end any more happily than you might expect, but he did acquire some land grants and was able to sell plant specimens. Governor Stirling did appoint him as paid Superintendent of the Government Garden, but then the Colonial Office abolished the position of Government Naturalist! He spent most of the rest of his days tending his garden and vines, and collecting for British botanist and entrepreneur James Mangles.

Drummondita hassellii, family Rutaceae, Merredin, WA.
James' brother Thomas was a nurseryman who collected in North America.
This genus commemorates them both – the I is a latinised form of J for James, and the T for Thomas!
The responsible party for this creativity was Irish botanist William Harvey.

Cephalipterum drummondii, Mount Magnet, inland WA.
This one was specifically named for James Drummond.

Thomas Mitchell was born in Stirlingshire in 1792 and joined the British army, fighting in the Spanish Peninsula wars, attaining the rank of major and becoming a surveyor and draughtsman. In 1827 he arrived in Sydney to become Deputy Surveyor-General  to John Oxley; when Oxley died the next year he got the top job, which he held until he died in 1855. His explorations were vital to the growing understanding of the colony. In 1831 he explored in north-western NSW, and reported that all the rivers flowed into the Darling. On other expeditions he followed the Darling from Bourke; the Lachlan to the Murrumbidgee; through western Queensland to try to find the route to Port Essington – he always had a profound belief in a river he called the Kindur, which he was sure would take him all the way to the northern sea; and the famous 'Australia Felix' journey in western Victoria. He wrote astutely and even sympathetically of Aboriginal culture, but his expeditions were involved in several fatal skirmishes. He collected natural history specimens as he went; on the western Victorian trip he took 100 sheep for food, and the shepherd was also the plant collector, which seems to be an unfortunate combination. Mitchell died after contracting pneumonia while surveying the road down the Clyde Mountain.

Native Orange Capparis mitchellii, Lake Broadwater, south-east Queensland.
Named for Mitchell by English botanist John Linley.

Our final Scot, Patrick Murray, Baron of Livingston, not only never visited Australia but could not have done so - he died well before the first English-speaker set foot on the continent. He had a famous garden, and after his early death in 1671 his huge plant collection was transferred to Edinburgh where it formed the nucleus of the Edinburgh Botanic Garden. Much later his countryman Robert Brown named the genus palm genus Livistona for him (or at least for his title, though it's unclear what happened to the 'ng'!).

Livistona rigida, Boodjamulla (Lawn Hill) National Park, north-west Queensland.

Which is about all I've got for you today. I'm very grateful to Scotland for, in small part at least, making me what I am. And I'm grateful for the many significant contributions that Scots have made to Australia, not least botanically. If you're a Scot, have a happy national day - even if you find it's not a holiday for you...

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On This Day, 21 July: Belgian National Day

1830 was a restive time in western Europe, with one branch of the French monarchy overthrowing another, and southern parts of the United Netherlands deciding they no longer wished to be quite so united. The ruling Dutch were expelled from these lands, and a constitution was drafted to found the country that we know as Belgium. It might seem a little strange now that the German aristocrat Leopold Saxe-Cobourg-Gotha was invited to become their king - a position he assumed on 21 July - but we in Australia aren't really in a position to say much on such a concept...

To mark the day, I'd like to introduce you, if any introduction is needed, to three 'Belgians' whose names live in the Australian bush as plants; I tried to find animals but to no avail, and I'd love it if you could help me. I use the cautionary inverted commas advisedly, as all three were born before Belgium was, and one died long before it was thought of. 

That man was Rembert Dodoens, a Flemish botanist-doctor of the 16th century, though most of his adult life was spent abroad (or more accurately, outside of the borders of what was to become Belgium). He served as personal physician to the Austrian emperor, and ended his days at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He was immensely influential for decades after his death, with his mighty herbal Cruydeboeck (1554), which was also a plant classification, being translated into French and then English, as A New Herbal, or Historie of Plants. No book of its time other than the bible was translated into so many languages and editions; it is said that it retained its influence for over 200 years. English-Scottish botanist Philip Miller honoured him, well after his death, with a genus of plants. (Linnaeus had apparently already proposed the name but not properly published it, as far as I can gather.)

Dodonaea is in the family Sapindaceae, a genus of around 70 species scattered across the warmer regions of the world, but 60 of them are Australian, where they are found pretty much throughout the country. 

Dodonaea boroniifolia, Tallong, New South Wales.
The papery winged fruits were reminiscent of those of hops, and early European settlers in Australia used
them in brewing. The results were not so impressive as to justify their continued use.

Some of the capsules, including this D. lobulata, Whyalla Conservation Park, South Australia,
are quite striking.

The flowers on the other hand tend to be small and inconspicuous, wind-pollinated
and with separate male and female plants.
D. viscosa, Gawler Ranges NP, South America.

Joseph Decaisne was born much later than Dodoens, in 1807, and spoke French rather than Flemish. He did have in common though that he pursued his career away from his birthplace, in his case in Paris. It was not a straight-forward career; he studied painting, attended medical school and became an apprentice gardener! This led him, by paths too convoluted to follow here, to the Chair of Statistical Agriculture and Professor of Culture at the Paris Museum of Natural History, President of the French Academy of Sciences and Director of the Jardin des Plantes. He was regarded as France’s leading botanist of the time; he never visited Australia, but worked on Australian material provided by French expeditions. The great German-Australian botanist Ferdinand von Mueller named an inland tree for him, one of my very favourites - see here for more about the tree.

Desert Oaks Allocasuarina decaisneana, central Australia.
Chambers Pillar, above:
Uluru at sunset, below.

The third Belgian botanist featured today differs from the others in a very significant way, and a most unusual one for the time - her name was Marie-Anne Libert. Female scientists were very uncommon indeed in the early nineteenth century, and Marie-Anne, born in 1782, was fortunate that her abilities and interests were encouraged by her father. As a young girl she was an avid field naturalist, and taught herself Latin to be able to read more on the topics that most interested her. She became an internationally respected botanist, with an especial interest in liverworts and pathenogenic fungi; she was the first to identify the fungus which causes Potato Blight.

During her life the German botanist Kurt Sprengel named a lovely genus of irises for her. (She also got a genus of fungi, Libertiella, which she might have appreciated even more.) Libertia is found in Australia, New Guinea, New Zealand, and South America.

Libertia chilensis (above and below), Laguna Verde near Lago Llanquihue, southern Chile.
(For reasons that evade me I can't find any pics I've taken of the local species, an
omission I must rectify this spring.)

 

I am of course also very grateful to Belgium for producing what are very arguably the best chocolates and beers in the world, but this is not the place to rhapsodise in that direction....

I can't say "Happy National Day, Belgium" in Flemish, and it would be very churlish to say it only in French, but have a good one, and thanks for sharing Rembert, Joseph and Marie-Anne with us.

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On This Day, 6 June; Swedish National Day

Today is celebrated by Swedes as their National Day, commemorating the election of Gustav Eriksson as first king of Sweden in 1523 (no, I know kings aren't usually elected, but he was - they do things differently there). This gave Sweden independence from a Danish-dominated confederacy, though the day wasn't formally celebrated until 1916, and didn't become the official National Day until 1983. 

Nonetheless that's good enough for them, and good enough for our purpose, which is to celebrate Swedes whose names are commemorated in Australian plants and animals - in practice it's mostly plants. As was usual for the time, many of those celebrated had no connection with Australia or its biota, but were being honoured by their peers; at least today's featured Swedes were all biologists, not patrons or other non-biologists whose favours taxonomists often tried to win with a name.

I'll start with the one who really did come to Australia, Daniel Solander, a star pupil of Linnaeus himself (surely the greatest of all Swedish biologists) who was engaged by Sir Joseph Banks to sail as a naturalist on the Endeavour with James Cook in 1770. Solander had been invited to London to teach the new classification system, and became employed by the British Museum, from which he took leave to accompany Banks. Using the Linnaean system he catalogued the expedition's collections while still at sea; using little reference cards he filled 27 volumes of animals and 25 of plants. He became and remained a good friend of Banks, who employed him as librarian, but died in London aged just 49.

Geranium solanderi, Namadgi National Park, above Canberra.

There is an animal named for him too, the Providence Petrel Pterodroma solandri, named by John Gould 62 years after Solander's death. For a while there were two, but Coenraad Temminck's name Psittacus solanderi was pre-empted - the really weird thing is that it was Temminck himself who'd provided the earlier valid name!

Glossy Black-Cockatoo Calyptorhynchus lathami, named by Temminck for English ornithologist
John Latham in 1807, a fact he'd apparently forgotten 14 years later when he tried to name it again for Solander!

After Solander's early death, Banks appointed Jonas Dryander, another pupil of Linnaeus, to replace him as his private librarian - Swedes were much in demand at the time, thanks in large part to Linnaeus. A very large and impressive genus of Western Australian members of the family Proteaceae was named for him; to much consternation and angst however it seems that Dryandra will be subsumed - for excellent taxonomic reasons I hasten to add - into the larger and more widely familiar genus Banksia.

Dryandra sp. (at least for now, perhaps) near Albany.

Other eminent Swedes also bloom on in Australia, though the original owners of the names never came here or studied Australian plants. In my part of the world the best known is the man who gave his name to the genus of the Australian Capital Territory's floral emblem Wahlenbergia gloriosa. (That's a story, and a controversial one, in itself, but we talked about that here, in an earlier post.)

Wahlenbergia stricta (and visitor), family Campanulaceae, Canberra.
Goran Wahlenberg, who German Heinrich Schrader commemorated with the name in 1821, was a botanist and
medical professor who specialised in Arctic plants.

Abraham Baeck was another late 18th century botanist-physician, who became personal physician to the King of Sweden; he was also a close friend of Linnaeus, who honoured him with a mostly Australian genus of Myrtaceae.

Baeckea utilis, Kosciuszko National Park.

Swedish Royal Physicians are better represented in Australia than most of us probably suspect - a widespread genus of aromatic Australian shrubs in the garden herb family, including some familiar east coastal ones, is named for another one.

Westringia rigida, Nullarbor Plain, western South Australia.
Westringia was named for Johan Westring by English botanist John Smith.
Westring mixed his royal caring duties with studies of lichens.

Johann Frankenius was another eminent Swedish botanist and anatomist who made the first complete listing of Swedish plants. Again it was Linnaeus who honoured him with the name of a delightful Australian plant genus - though he was not, as one apparently reputable source suggests, a friend of Linnaeus, since he died some 40 year before Linnaeus was born.

Massed Frankenia sp., in dry lake bed near Mount Magnet, inland Western Australia.
The genus is widely spread in Mediterranean parts of the world, though the majority are Australian.

Finally, yet another botanical colleague of Linnaeus is found in many damp places in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, where sedges grow.

Gahnia grandis, Cradle Mountain National Park, Tasmania.
The saw sedges have savage little silicon teeth along the edges of the leaves,
which I'm sure is no reflection on Henry Gahn for whom they are named.

So, happy day to any Swedish readers I may have! If you can't visit soon, at least know that you're well represented in our bushland. And I trust the rest of you will join me in raising a glass to our Swedish friends. Skål!

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