Press Releases

21 November 2005

Labour of love produces first horticultural guide of its kind in Australia

Floras and other books on plants suggest flowers, but the Horticultural Flora of South-eastern Australia  is no ordinary Flora.

It is Australia’s first-ever publication of its kind with an emphasis on botany rather than horticulture, and covers common garden plants as well as fruit and nut trees, vegetables, indoor plants and garden weeds.

The five-volume identification guide to the cultivated plants of south-eastern Australia, both native and exotic, has taken over 10 years to complete by Dr Roger Spencer, the senior horticultural botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne. It covers South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales and southern Queensland. The final volume has just been published by the University of New South Wales.

Dr Spencer said: “Apart from being an identification guide, the Flora documents and records basic botanical information on all the commonly cultivated garden plants as well as many of the slightly unusual plants encountered in our nurseries, parks and gardens.”

  “Until now the horticultural industry has had no inventory of the large number of plants (both native and exotic) which are cultivated in gardens, no easily accessible means of identifying them, and no reliable guide to their names,” said Dr Spencer.

 “What this guide does is give gardeners, students, nursery staff and others in the horticultural industry the means to identify garden plants, and provides detailed information on their botany and cultivation,“ he added.

Dr Spencer has taken full advantage of all the resources of the Royal Botanic Gardens including the living plant collections, the dried plant collections of the National Herbarium, the fine botanical library, and a wide range of botanical and horticultural expertise.

To identify particular plants, readers can work their way from broad plant groupings to particular species using botanical keys; this process is assisted by the many exquisite line drawings produced by illustrator Su Pearson. The colour photographs explore the wide reaches of the plant kingdom and the plant structures used for identification, while the plant descriptions draw special attention to useful simple distinguishing characters.

Media inquiries: Penny Underwood on (03) 9818 8540.

Review copies of Volume 5 are available by contacting Penny.