Kevin Taylor and his poetry created a great Australian Garden

This is from Secrets of Lightness, seven glass panels inscribed with the words of Kevin Taylor. Fragments of poems in a botanic garden.

Kevin Taylor (1953-2011) was one of the designers and creative minds behind new Australian Garden at Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne. Kevin was also a poet. He used the process of writing poems to help him conceive and design the kinds of inspiring landscapes you can see in the Australian Garden.

Secrets of Lightness honours his contribution to the Australian Garden and to garden design and life more broadly. Keven died in a car accident in August 2011 and his partner Kate Cullity, at the suggestion of my predecessor as Director, Phil Moors, agreed to this beautiful memorial.

Many of you will recognise the hand of Janet Laurence in this work. It's a collaborative effort between Janet, Kate and an engineer David Lancashire. Others were involved, including another garden designer involved in the Australian Garden, Paul Thompson, and many of our staff. You can see how well it sits with a backdrop of grey-green eucalypts.

The memorial, and artwork, was unveiled a few weeks ago in the Box Garden, part of the Eucalypt Walk and my favourite part of the Australian Garden. Also I learned, Kevin's.

The final stage of the Australian Garden was opened in October last year, 17 years after Taylor Cullity were engaged to lead the project, in association with Paul Thompson. (Perry Lethlean joined Kevin Taylor and Kate Cullity during the project, forming Taylor Cullity Lethlean.)

At the unveiling we had Phil Moors and Perry Lethlean talk about Kevin Taylor and his legacy, and Kate Cullity read some of Kevin's poems, including lines from Secrets of Lightness...

      "Those who live in the shadow of gravity employ the secrets of lightness to survive. 

      The feathery canopies of red gums dance."

I also like one of Kevin's more prosaic descriptions of the Australian Garden, where he says it will inspire visitor to "further explore Australian plants...through surprise, humour, awe or reverence". And all of the above together I would add.

This was a day for contemplation.

Images: From my phone except the first and last (Phil and Tim) which are far more expertly shot by Luke Saffigna, Visitor Programs Officer at Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne.

Baron misnames a cereal-leaved plant from road to Adelaide

While I'm on a roll, here's another Eremophila, the Coccid Emu-bush. I was tempted to title this post the cock-eyed-emu bush but I couldn't find any connection between this plant and sight & flight impaired birds.

The common name is in fact a reference to the tiny cupped leaves I presume. Coccid come from the Greek kokkis, which means grain. The botanical name Eremophila gibbifolia covers much the same territory, with the last part referring to the bulging or humped leaves.

As you'll recall, Eremophila is the Emu-bush genus. Now, apologies for getting all historical and taxonomical. I drift into this from time to time. It's such fun!

In a paper on 50 new plant species from Australia published in 1855, the first Director of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, described this species from 'stony ranges' at Mount Barker Creek in South Australia, placing it in an apparently new genus called Duttonia along with another species from a 'rocky creek'.

As bad luck would have it, this was a name he had used already in 1853 for a daisy genus. So four years later he slotted the Coccid Emu-bush (and its rocky creek ally) into Eremophila, a genus that Robert Brown had erected back in 1810, and one that now includes a couple of hundred species from Australia.

I'm not sure why this happened but presume it was a lapse of memory from Mueller, to be forgiven when  faced with 2000 species to describe in a scantily documented flora.

Dutton, I'm thinking, was Francis Dutton, a farmer-politician from South Australia. Mueller knew him from his time in Adelaide, on arrival in Australia a decade before.

The Coccid Emu-bush grows in various places around the road from Melbourne to Adelaide, but also on the other side of the Gulf of St Vincent as well as further eastward in Victoria near Rushworth and Wedderburn. It's a rare plant in the wild.

However you can see this plant in flower at the moment in the Australian Garden at Cranbourne, or as photographed here, in the Mallee Rare and Threatened Plant Garden at Melbourne. It also sits outside the National Herbarium of Victoria, in a garden featuring plants collected and named by the Baron. I wonder if we could get away with calling this display 'Baron but not Barren'...

Note: I'm going to reduce my blogging rate a little so expect posts every week rather than every 3-4 days. 

Devil's Marble a bitter fruit, or is it?

These are Devil's marbles on a Devil's Marbles. The fleshy pink fruits and the shrub that produces them are also called Winter Apple, Amulla or Johnny Apple (not to be confused with Jonathan apple in our local stores).

You wouldn't expect a fruit named after the devil to particularly nice. It's described as slightly bitter or according to Mark Lodder, on the Australian National Botanic Gardens website, simply bitter.

Yet Patricia Gardner (Toowoomba Plants) says the name Johnny Apple is 'probably based on the tastiness of these sweet little fruits'. Patricia offers a reasonable etymology for the common name Devil's Marble: a corruption of the species name debilis which actually means lesser or reduced, referring to the plants prostrate habit.

I discovered the fruits on the way up Howson Hill in the Australian Garden at Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne. Of course now that I'm home I regret not sampling a fruit and providing you with a definitive answer. Hang on, this plant was growing in a botanic garden so I can't just pick a fruit. Even the Director has to do the right thing so that visitors over winter can enjoy the same spectacle I did on the weekend...

So I don't know what the fruits taste like but I can tell you the plant bearing them is Eremophila debilis, an Emu Bush from near coastal New South Wales and Queensland.

The fruits were apparently eaten by Aboriginal people on the east coast but I haven't found much about how they were prepared or whether they are part of the European bush food pantry.

The Winter Apple was once considered to be part of a related genus called Myoporum. Under that name it was reported as a native plant from New Zealand. The few wild populations in that country are now thought to be deliberate plantings or to have escaped from gardens.

Given its pretty fruits and low stature (good-looking and hardy ground covers are always in demand)  it is set to become even more popular in horticulture on both sides of the Tasman. It doesn't seem to escape from gardens here in Australia but that may depend on how tasty the fruits are.

These of course are the real Devil's Marbles.

The amazing, wonderful and remarkable Borya

This is an exceedingly rare species. The remaining natural population consists of 70 tufts, in five small clumps spread across a hundred square metres or so. It's listed as endangered nationally.

Borya mirabilis is a tough-leaved lily-like plant with small white, star-like flowers. It lives in the Wonderland Range of Victoria's Grampians (Gariwerd) National Park and each of the 70 'plants' are almost genetically identical. It's effectively, and perhaps really, a single clonal plant.

In summer it shrivels up, playing dead (one of the so-called resurrection plants I've posted on before, able to lose up to 94% of its water), ready it seems to burn into extinction should a bushfire pass through. In 2005 the Mt Lubra fires tested its fire tolerance: about half the clones were lost but the rest re-sprouted a few months later. So it seems relatively well adapted to fire and drought, despite it rather parlous state today.

Borya mirabilis was discovered in only 1924 and first thought to be a rather isolated occurrence of the otherwise Western Australian species, Borya nitida. It was found again in 1952 and then not until 1981, when it was discovered to be a distinct, and rather rare, species.

I called it 'lily-like' because it has been confirmed by recent molecular work that Borya is in its own family Boryaceae. At various times it has been included in a more broadly viewed Liliaceae.

Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne have been growing this cushion lily in their nursery for decades, going right back to the time when David Churchill was Director. Material from the botanic gardens collection, and many years of propagation expertise, were used to establish a new population about 20 kilometres (and hopefully a bushfire or two) in the Mt Difficult Range.

Mirabilis means amazing, wonderful or remarkable, and this species is perhaps all three. There are other plants down to their last individual or clone (e.g. Lomatia tasmanica in Tasmania), but few that seem to be clinging on so desperately to existence as the Grampians Cushion-lily.

Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne botanist Neville Walsh, and colleagues Noushka Reiter and Anne Lawrie  have just published a paper in our scientific journal Muelleria on the fungi that live associated with the roots of this species, including those that live in special nodules. This is the kind of information that might make the difference between survival and extinction should drought, fire and no doubt pestilence conspire to wipe out the remaining plants.

Images: The flowering plant is a typically charming shot by John Eichler and the equally charming hand with the plant is Neville Walsh's (hand and photo), taken during the translocation to the Mt Difficult Range. 

This tree's for turning but watch out for the monkey brains

This is the monkey brain I brought back to our kitchen. There were plenty more at the base of the Osage Orange tree in a small park near the Yarra River, not far from home in Hawthorn. The stalk is a clue to its real identity. And perhaps its colour, texture and location.

It's autumn and this tree is for turning, to butcher and paraphrase the most famous quote of a recently dead British Prime Minister. The crown of the tree is half yellow and half green, and the yellow leaves are just starting to joining the monkey brains on the ground.

Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera) evolved near the Red River valley of southern Oklahoma and northern Texas, an area also devoid of monkeys I believe. It was used for hedges on the Great Plains and then spread from there to become a quite commonly naturalised plant in North America.

John Pickard, a botanist who used to work at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney prepared a 28 pages Conservation Management Report on an Osage Orange hedge at Muogamarra Nature Reserve north of Sydney. He says that Osage Orange was 'the favoured hedge plant in the prairie States of the United States before the invention of barbed wire in 1874'. The Osage has thorns...

Osage Orange has also become naturalised in Australia (see Atlas of Living Australia), particularly in New South Wales, but you don't see it planted much these days - although any botanic garden worth its salt has one or two. It's very much an old fashioned plant like the Pepper or Peppercorn Tree (Schinus molle). John Pickard doesn't consider the hedge at Muogamarra to be any threat to the nearby bushland.

As to its common name, the Osage were a local tribe in the Red River valley. And while the fruit looks more like the brain of a monkey (apparently) than an orange, it does smell like a citrus fruit. The Great Plains Nature Center (source of my North American information) suggest you find one that has been out in the sun for a while and enjoy the orange-peel-like perfume of the skin. Like ginkgos, and plenty of other plants, the trees are either male or female so not all will bear fruit.

Osage Orange is in the Moraceae and the fruit does look like a pumped up mulberry, another member of this family. However the fruit doesn't look like something you'd eat, at least to me. If you split it open it's full of (up to 200) seeds and other bits and pieces of not particularly attractive plant material. Apparently the seeds are edible but you have to remove them from the pulp and skin which you should definitely not eat.

As you might have gathered by now, Monkey Brain is one of it's other common names, along with Hedge Apple and Bodark. The name Bodark is a corruption of 'bois d'arc', French for bow wood. The branches were once used to make bows for hunting by the Osage and other Native Americans.

You are unlikely to find Monkey Brains in the kitchens of North America but you may find them under beds and lining basement windows. It's thought that they will frighten off spiders and cockroaches. As it turns out the fruit contains a chemical called elemol which does deter certain insects. I see the mosquito in that list so I may leave my Monkey Brain here in the kitchen until summer.

Not enough of these native jonquils to make a Calastemma garland

West of Merbein, on the floodplain of the Murray River, grows a population of a lily-like plant with bright yellow flowers. Not a daffodil, not a jonquil, but a native Australian plant.

Sometimes this yellow flowered bulb is considered part of a species that has mostly reddish flowers, Calostemma purpureum. When the flowers of Calostemma purpureum are not reddish (or purple I guess) they can be creamy, pink or a combination of the above. They can also be entirely yellow I gather. The Australian National Botanic Garden appears to have them all on display.

Calostemma luteum, if you accept a second species in this genus, has larger flowers, and all parts of the flower are predominantly yellow. But as you can see in these pictures, the middle tube and the radiating petals can be flushed with red. Although described from a plant in cultivation it can be separated in the field, at least if you live south of the Murray River...

In the online Flora of New South Wales, PlantNet, only one species is accepted. In the hard (and soon to be soft) copy Flora of Victoria both are accepted albeit our luteum only warranting a small paragraph at the end of purpureum - which is code for 'we are not really very confident about this' or 'this came to us a little late' (my co-editor Neville Walsh recalls it was the latter).

Calostemma purpureum and Calostemma luteum extend into South Australia and New South Wales along the Murray-Darling system, and if you accept the latter it goes all the way into Queensland (otherwise of course the purpureum thingo does and happens to be only yellow in that State...).

In Victoria both species (we accept them remember) grow in flood prone lands near the Murray River between Boundary Bend and Wentworth. The red flowered species can appear in hundreds or even thousands in a good season. That season, for both species, is February to April.

In 2008 a third (or second) species was described from South Australia, called Calostemma abdicatum. Its flowers are missing the whole tube bit, as well as being large like luteum but coloured like purpureum. So there is not much debate about this one being different to the other(s).

Our Calostemma luteum in the Royal Botanic Gardens were almost finished flowering by the time I photographed them a week or so ago (these are the fruits, or perhaps bulbils?). They live in our rare and threatened garden bed, just above The Terrace cafe, and I presume they come from the clump discovered in March 1994, the only population so far known in Victoria. It's either rather rare or rather absent in Victoria, depending on your taxonomy.

Calostemma is in the plant family Amarillidaceae, as you'd expect, in both its traditional and newer expanded form. This family in its narrowest sense also contains the daffodil and jonquil, as well the Crinum Lily and various other showy bulbs.

Any Calostemma is called the Garland Lily. The yellow flowered ones, Calostemma luteum if you like, are called the Yellow Garland Lily and in at least one case the Native Jonquil. That last name reeks of colonial servitude but it's pretty damn accurate and useful.

"Then came quail and squid-ink rice cake with a wild weed and nettle salad"

The wild weed in my title is Portulaca oleracea, aka Purslane, Pigweed or by some Aboriginal communities Munyeroo or Parnamula. The gastronomic garland is from an online review of 3-hatted restaurant Attica in Elsternwick by 'Richard from Melbourne'.

I am familiar with Nettle as a vegetable, although reluctant to collect it myself after too many irritating encounters with its toxic hairs. The Purslane I knew little about but all of a sudden it's everywhere - in a batch of herbs we bought at the local market, growing as a weed in our front garden and then broadcast across a billboard at Hawthorn station.

Portulaca oleracea has been an essential part of various Mediterranean dishes 'for ever' but it seems to have been freshly discovered in Melbourne in recent years. The Age chose to make the analogy between chef Ben Shewry's culinary curiosity and their own approach to reporting news.

The hint is, possibly, in the name. The Australian Plants Plants Society suggest the species name 'oleracea' means pertaining to a kitchen garden. Alternatively, it may just mean olive-coloured... (The genus name refers to the milky sap in the stems.)

Although escaping from gardens and becoming weedy in places, this species has been considered by some as a true Australian native (it grows in every State and Territory except Tasmania)*. Early settlers used it leaves in salads and cooked as a spinach substitute.

Like a few other local plants, its seeds were sometimes ground and baked into a damper. In fact the Royal Botanic Gardens & Domain Trust in Sydney describe the seeds as 'one of the most important bush foods of inland Australia'. Apparently the seeds are 20 per cent protein and 16 per cent fat.

It grows pretty much everywhere in the temperate world, as a native and a weed. With a taproot and succulent stems and leaves, it does well in dry (or neglected) gardens. It tolerates moderately salty soil as well.

The small yellow flowers in spring and summer don't make it a horticultural highlight but it's a hardy little plant and you can always eat it before it becomes too weedy.

*Note: The informed opinion of Tony Bean is that it is in fact an introduced plant that has become naturalised. Thanks to @angrywagtails and @danieljmurf for their tweets bringing this to my attention.
*More notes...: And thanks to the same for recent reference from the far west saying that it is both native and a weed over in Western Australia. The debate continues. Meanwhile Attica is voted the 21st best restaurant in the universe, or at least on our planet.

In what way is Quisqualis who and which?

Rangoon Creeper is evocative enough as a name but the botanical name for this plant is even more intriguing - Quisqualis indica. The last bit is fairly straight forward, although the species grows throughout the tropics and not just in India.

As for Quisqualis, this is Latin for something like 'any such', 'what way is it now', 'in which way' or perhaps 'Who and what?'. It's one of those words that means je ne sais quoi.

But why would a plant be given such a name? It seems that the author, Georg Eberhard Rumphius, a seventeenth century Dutch East Indies Trading Company merchant and man of good humour, was punning on the local name for the plant, Undani, which sounds a bit like the Dutch word hoedanig, which means something like quis qualis...

All this had a deeper meaning for Rumphius who found it sometimes looking like a shrub or a tree, but then next time a vine. Sometimes the stem was thorny and other times smooth. Like the God Proteus, he said, it takes many forms. His pet name Quis qualis must have appealed to the Swedish botanists Carl Linnaeus who described the genus a half century or so later as Quisqualis.

This charming and charmingly named plant grows luxuriously around one of the pillars near The Terrace cafe in Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne. It can be invasive in more tropical climes, such as southern USA and northern Australia, but I haven't seen any reports of it becoming naturalised in southern Australia.

Other people obviously like the name 'quisqualis' as much as me. There is a website devoted to rare plants carrying this name, which also has a go at explaining why the Rangoon Creeper is called Quisqualis.

Their version has different plant hunters finding different forms of the plant (shrub, creeper, thorny...) and sending them back to home to the confusion of the experts who only get to see fragments of the full story. This site also mentions the change in colour from white to red as the flower ages, one of the appealing aspects of this bush/creeper in horticulture.

The perfume of the flower - 'fruity' or toasted coconut - is as exotic and attractive as its names.

If you want to experience the full splendour of the Rangoon Creeper plant you should use a trellis, pergola or column so that it can do it's thing, whatever that is, with some support.

Note: Quisqualis is sometimes included within a more broadly circumscribed Combretum but I followed a 2011 paper that recommends sticking with Quisqualis for our species. However these kind of taxonomic judgments are not always straight forward and Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne has decided to use Combretum for now. Horticultural botanists Roger Spencer and Rob Cross provided the following background. "The

 name Quisqualis indica is used, among others, by the Flora of China, Papua New Guinea Checklist, the Queensland checklist and the European Garden Flora (second edition). The name Combretum indicum was adopted in the Gardens Census in 2000 as a result of a series of papers by Jongkind (1991, 1992, 1999).  It is also followed by English botanist Stace in a well-respected synoptic work edited by Kubitsky (2007), also in Mabberley (2008) and following a discussion of characters by Tilney (2002). There is clearly a divergence of views on the appropriate genus name for this species. 

The paper by Jordaan et al (Bothalia 41(1): 161-169 Generic status of Quisqualis... has been read and noted. It is our view that there is still taxonomic work to be done to warrant the use of the genus name Quisqualis and that we may indeed change back to Quisqualis when this is published.  Even Jordaan et al. note that the taxonomic work is not complete.  In the meantime we think Combretum is the most appropriate name to use in the Census." Of course I'm sticking with Quisqualis because it makes for a good blog post!

Tingletongue won't trouble Life Savers

If you are like me and haven't bought a packet of Fruit Tingles for a decade or two the main thing you learn from this post may be that Life Savers now own the brand, not Allen's.

I discovered this amazing fact after chewing on the bark of Dinosperma erythrococcum. Not because I hallucinated up images of various lolly companies and superimposed them onto Fruit Tingles wrappers, but because the bark is said to tingle the tongue.

You get nothing from the trunk of the tree but if you chew a small twig you get a slight tingle. Nothing, as I say, to trouble the manufacturers of sherbet lollies but interesting nevertheless.

What attracted me to the tree was not its culinary potential but the bright red berries. These and the leaves don't tingle.

We have only one of these trees in the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne and as luck often has it, it has no label. I asked fellow botanist here Neville Walsh for his opinion after after smelling the crushed fruit and leaves (and quite possibly tasting as Neville tends to do) he thought the Rutaceae family. That's the family of the lemon and boronia, two very aromatic plants.

After a little botanical sleuthing Neville came up with the name Dinosperma erythrococcum which fits very nicely. It is a member of the Rutaceae family and it's leaves contain small oil glands full of lovely chemicals such as geranyl acetate, linalool, spathaulenol, ocimene  and so on (not I don't know what these smell or taste like either).

According to our sources, the common name of Tingletongue refers to the stems also being chemically active. You can see few raised dimples in this stem with holes in their middle. Perhaps they have something to do with the tingle source. Or perhaps not...

Dinosperma erythrococcum used to be in the genus Meliocope, which I've featured before. Meliocope elleryana has spectacular chunky pink flowers (see my post on the doughwoods from a couple of years ago).

The Tingletongue grows naturally in dry rain forest in the north-east corner of New South Wales and up into Queensland. It's uncommon in New South Wales and also in cultivation - our single specimen is certainly eye-catching.

Is the bark poisonous? Well if it is particularly toxic you'll be able to test this by tracking my blog over the next few days. No new posts may mean it is. And this is the culprit!

Images: Except for the packet of Fruit Tingles from Wikipedia, the rest are photos I took in the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne.

Castlemainia, a significant part of the Victorian craze for botanic gardens

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Victorians living in Victoria were (on average) creating botanic gardens at the rate of more than one a year.

According to Gwen Pascoe's Long Views and Short Vistas (2012), 45 botanic gardens were established in Victoria between 1846 and 1888. One of these was the Castlemaine Botanical Gardens, gazetted on 21 February 1860, and I visited it last weekend.

The Gardens first Curator, Phillip Doran created and cared for the Castlemaine Botanical Gardens from 1866 until his death in 1913 (aged 83), a grand total of 47 years in the job. Doran had worked for a time in English gardens, including an apprenticeship with Joseph Paxton at Chatsworth, before migrating to Australia.

Sometimes Mueller is implicated in the design of this botanic garden. It seems that he provided plants but not landscaping advice, although the design today has more of the Mueller than the Guilfoyle about it (them being the first two Directors of Melbourne's botanic garden).

Most of the significant trees I saw on the weekend were provided as seed by the Government Botanist Ferdinand Mueller, but also the curator of the Geelong Botanic Gardens, Daniel Bunce. I had to borrow Lynda's iPhone, and her app, to find out how many specimens are on the National Trust's Register of Significant Trees today.

About 14 different kinds. Plus, not on the Register, some impressive avenues of elms (this one beside the sunken oval, technically just outside the botanic garden today) and oaks (the next picture, truly inside the botanic gardens).

The significant trees are all over the shop but there is an 'informal arboretum', as it's described in the Statement of Significance, up the north end.

One of the trees I was very fond of on my early visits to the Gardens was this Catalpa bignonioides, near the main gate. It's lime green leaves were particularly appealing in high summer. I gather this one was planted in 1872 by Philip Doran and the Significant Tree app describes it as 'the finest and largest known example in Victoria'

The pines I particularly enjoyed last weekend. Some stately Stone Pines (Pinus pinea) as well as others such as this Maritime Pine (Pinus pinaster) with its strongly textured bark. Other pines listed as significant are Pinus ponderosa, Pinus sabiniana and Pinus torreyana.

A couple of historic notables in the rest of the list are the tropical and often weedy Vachellia (previously Acacia) farnesiana, the Sweet Acacia, and the Asian Pittosporum illicioides (previously Pittosporum sahnianum) which features in the Southern China Garden beside the lake in Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne.

There are also some interesting oak and elm species, cultivars and crosses. The oldest planting is a Quercus robur planted in May 1863 to celebrate the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales (Edward and Alexandra).

There are also some very nice Cork Oaks (Quercus suber).

The Gardens has shrunk over the years from its original 31 hectares. Today the botanic garden component is  24 hectares after bits were hived off for a sports oval, caravan park, swimming pool and eventually a hospital. Still, over the years (since I lived there in the late 1970s and during family visits before and after then) I've used and enjoyed all but the last as much as the botanic garden.

From darkest Peru to Melbourne, the little black salvia flower

Very Melbourne this flower. Dressed in black*, restrained and...cultivated (well it's been planted in a garden).

Salvia discolor is its name and it has just come into flower outside our living room window. I hadn't noticed it until Lynda pointed out that a fairly nondescript plant with grey-green leaves had sprung black flowers.

It reputedly flowers late summer and early autumn so it is actually right on cue. It's also described as drought resistant, which explains why it's growing outside our lounge room (the garden around our temporary abode has been planted out to survive the toughest of Melbourne summers).

Andean Silver-leaf Sage is the common name, referencing the Andes where it grows naturally and the silvery hue of the leaves. It grows high in the Andes, in vegetation almost free of trees, so my title is a little misleading (like Shaun Micallef having to play Chatanooga Choo Choo every time he mentions the Australian politician Barneby Joyce, I can't mention Peru without adding 'darkest' thanks to Paddington Bear).

The other charming feature of the flower is the tendril-like blue-purple style, squeezed from the top of the flower.

The leaves are said to smell like blackcurrants, but mine smell more or less leafy. Although with the power of suggestion I can conjure up a faint berry odor, perhaps.

At least tearing off a leaf to smell it revealed the source of the botanical epithet 'bicolor'. The leaves are dull green above and silvery white beneath. The stems, like the lower surface of the leaves, are covered in fluffy hairs too so this gives the plant it's silvery look.

Black flowers are unusual in nature and this one is, like most, a very dark someothercolour. In this case purple, deep purple...

What animal would be attracted to such darkly coloured flowers I don't know. Hummingbirds are often cited as pollinating salvias. The only wildlife I found on the plant was this rusty coloured insect. Here in the middle of Melbourne I imagine there are few Andean pollinators but maybe this 'Flinders Street Fly' (sorry) has flown all the way from darkest Peru....

*I've done this tenuous link before but I figure if it continues to amuse me, it might just raise the curl of a smile with you.

Criminals don't like a neatly trimmed hedge

Received wisdom (i.e. knowledge often of the most unreliable kind) is that thickets of plants provide good places for criminals to dwell and hone their craft.

Well, it turns out, in Philadelphia at least, that vegetation, well maintained, can lower crime rates. Aggravated assault, robbery and burglary all drop when you clip your hedge. But first you have to grow a hedge.

A study out of Temple University, in Philadelphia PA, found that 'the presence of grass, trees and shrubs is associated with lower crime rates'.

Jeremy Mennis and Mary Wolfe used satellite imagery and crime statistics - after discounting the effects of poverty, education levels and population density - to come to this conclusion. Their results are published in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning but unless you want to pay $42 you'll have to, like me, get the gist of the study from their media release on Eurekalert!.

Mennis and Wolfe argue that 'well maintained greenery' is good for social interaction and what they call 'community supervision' (which I assume is like Neighbourhood Watch). It also calms us down, they say. Calm people, it seems, are less likely to commit crimes.

They add that vegetation also reduces stormwater run-off and improves the quality of our lives in other ways so this crime reduction is an added bonus.

They don't, at least in the press release or abstract, explain why the vegetation has to be well-maintained and what that really means. However they do confess that theft doesn't go down in vegetated areas. Presumably thieving criminals still find a dense thicket of plants a useful cover.

So for a safer city, but possibly fewer personal belongings, we should fill our cities with neatly pruned plants like these.

Images: Neatly trimmed hedges in Madrid (Spain), Powis (Wales), Sissinghurst (UK) and Versailles (France).