Flora of the South West: Bunbury - Augusta - Denmark

When I started trying to identify plants in my area, Denmark Western Australia, I visited the local library and took out several books. Most of them had lots of photos and looked like they would be very helpful. One, a double volume tome called Flora of the South West: Bunbury - Augusta - Denmark, had no photos and didn't appeal very much but I borrowed it anyway. I then set about using the books.

I very quickly realised that the books with nice photos included barely any of the plants I was trying to identify and the only way of using them was to flip through hoping to find a match. Flora of the South West on the other hand has a key to lead to the right genus followed by keys within each genus to break it into groups. Finally descriptions within the groups allow an identification to be made to species level. All the other books went back to the library but this one I kept renewing endlessly - luckily no-one else ever wanted it!

I tried to find a copy of the book to buy but it is long out of print. I looked for a second hand copy without any success but then out of the blue one day I got an email from eBay that something matched my saved search. It turned out to be a copy in very good condition which I instantly bought - I would have settled for any condition!

The only problem with the book is that it was published in 2002 and lots of changes have occurred since then. Species have been moved from one genus to another and new species have been described. I have lots of ad-hoc notes about the place to help me with these changes.

My intention now is to tidy up these notes and make journal entries here so that they can help me and possibly others too, even if they don't have the book. What I intend to do is use Florabase to identify the species of a particular genus that are thought to be present in Denmark Shire and then work through the species cross referencing them to Flora of the South West or adding notes if they are new species or otherwise excluded from the book.

Posted on June 1, 2023 11:52 AM by boobook99