Bounded by the Boyne River, Tannum Sands State High School, and various housing developments is a patch of woodland with great variety in floral assemblages and structure. Every time I go there I find something different, with the most recent discovery being a small patch of
Byblis liniflora, a really neat carnivorous plant. The best thing about this little patch of bush is that it is just
right there, you know, and most people just dismiss it as yucky bush only good for bulldozing or for 4wding, but there are some really cool things there that people will never ever know about if they don't take the time to really look.
The same patch of bush must also have some cool drainage patterns, because there is a neat chain of small ponds and an ephemeral creek. Even some of the drier sites on slopes must have poor drainage, because just under the sparse grass is a layer of moss awaiting water. The sites that are really sandy support a veritable carpet of a couple of different species of sundews (
Drosera, a genus of carnivorous plants).
Drosera finlaysoniana (above) is an annual sundew, growing, flowering, and setting seed in the course of one season. It is part of the
indica species complex which is a bit screwy. Pretty much the only field character that sets
finlaysoniana apart from
indica is that
finlaysoniana has the tentacles/trichomes all the way down to the stem, covering the petiole, while
indica has naked petioles.
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| Teeny mushroom at the ephemeral creek site |
Drosera burmannii is another annual sundew. Most at the sites are around the size of a 10c piece, but when fed well get much larger. They also change colour depending on how much light and food they receive. I have not seen
Drosera spatulata at any of the sites yet, which is a bit weird. Some of the larger
burmannii look similiar to
spatulata but the leaves aren't spatulate enough and don't have enough of a stalk to be
spatulata.
The sites also are home to some tuberous
Drosera. These ones grow from a little orange potato looking tuber that grows and then goes dormant each year. Each plant first goes through a rosette stage like the one above, before producing a tall trailing stem that eventually terminates in flowers. I am unsure if there are a couple of different species here, because some are red and some are pale, which for the tuberous
Drosera can be indicators of a separate species.
Xyris complanta (above) is actually quite abundant in the area, but you wouldn't know it unless it flowered. When not flowering, it is an unobtrusive clump of grassy looking leaves easily looked over. Each flower head produces several flowers, with only one short lived flower emerging at a time.
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| (above, below) A red burmannii on its last legs |
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| (above, below) Thecanthes cornucopiae gets these really nifty flowerheads |
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| (above) A burmannii starting to look a bit spatulata-ish. Or maybe it is spatulata? |
Another site behind the school is what I call the 'heath' site. In actual fact it is nothing like a heath habitat. It would be something like an open
Allocasuarina and
Eucalyptus crebra woodland with no shrub layer and a ground layer dominated by grasses,
Lomandra,
Dianella,
Drosera,
Xanthorrhoea, and fabaceous herbs. This site is where the small patch of
Byblis liniflora resides. A 4wd/biking track bisects the site, and the
Byblis grow along the edge of the cutting formed by the track.
It was very frustrating to find
Byblis so close to home after spending ages looking for them in Townsville. But still, I finally got to see them. They don't look like much in situ, but cultivated specimens are really cool.
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| (above) Murdannia graminea pop up after a bit of rain. The strappy leaves in the back belong to Crinum flaccidum. |
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| (above) Tricoryne elatior is another one you won't see unless it flowers |
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| (above) More tuberous Drosera. This individual has passed the rosette stage and is ready to flower. |
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| (above) a really dewy healthy burmannii |
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| (above) more tuberous, I think this is Drosera auriculata. |
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| (above, below) Byblis liniflora! Finally! |
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| (above, below) Another finlaysoniana |
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| Neato little mantis on a Dodonaea viscosa |
Past the 'heath' in the more hilly area, the vegetation changes to a more closed in ironbark (
Eucalyptus crebra) forest with an
Acacia conferta shrub layer and a ground layer of mostly
Xanthorrhea and
Dianella. Here and there the odd
Grevillea banksii might be found, as well as
Hibiscus divaricatus.
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| (above, below) Red form of Grevillea banksii |
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| (above, below), Native sarsparilla Hardenbergia violacea, something I did not expect to see |
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| (above), Xanthorrhoea flowers |
Past the ironbark woodland and down the other side of the hilly area is a large boggy patch with a pond. The vegetation changes to a blue gum (
Eucalyptus tereticormis) woodland with a bit of an
Acacia and
Alphitonia shrub layer, while the ground layer is mostly sedges, nardoo (
Marsilea), and waterlilies (
Nymphaea caerulea). I include the waterlilies in the ground layer because there were very few in the actual pond bit, the majority of them were in the part of the forest that floods, so maybe the bulbs/tubers what have you lie dormant there until flooding or something.
Another carnivorous plant is found here, a bladderwort,
Utricularia australis. This species is fully aquatic, and has little air filled bladders on the stems that suck up little critters in the water.
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| (above) This is the section that floods, with the pond being off to the right |
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| (above) Lots and lots of nardoo |
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| (above) With flowers like these I can almost forgive Nymphaea caerulea for being an introduced species |
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| (above) The pond with Utricularia australis. They are there I swear! All the teeny yellow blotches are the flowers |
I was originally going to attach a map of the site with the different sites and areas colour coded, but I am torn between wanting people to know about all the cool stuff and not wanting people to go there and completely trash everything. This little patch is being cleared around the edges for the Tannum Blue Estate, which is a shame, because there are heaps of terrestrial jewel orchids (
Geodorum densiflorum) which must have gotten ripped up in the process. People already go walking along the 4wding and bike trails with their dogs, and the 4wding and biking can be pretty destructive when people don't know what they are doing. Just gotta hope that people take the time and look close and realise how cool a patch of boring everyday bush can be.
