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AUSTRALIA'S WILDLIFE & NATURE |
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Australian Flora
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Australian Wildlife
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Australian Flora
Australia has been separated from the rest of the world for thousands of years and therefore plants have been able to evolve independently, adapting to the, often cruel natural, conditions.
There are a lot of plants that are native to Australia, and many have characteristics not seen anywhere else.
It has been estimated that there are about 20.000 to 25.000 different plants native to Australia.
There is diversity within Australia´s flora due to its unique climate and geographical aspects. There are:
tropical and temperate rainforests
sclerophyllous forests ( there are plants which have adapted leathery, hard or spiny leaves ) and woodlands ( wet and dry)
savanna
stony inland deserts
sandy heathlands
One of the ways that plants have adjusted to the harsh conditons is by relying on fires to encourage germinization. Gumnuts and other seed enclosures can only be opened by the extreme heat of a bushfire.
Eucalyptus Tree
 Of all the Australian trees, the eucalyptus, the gum tree, is the best known one.
There are 500 species of the eucalyptus and there are many varieties. Various species have adapted to be able to grow in snowbound alpine environments, costal plains or the sandy deserts, but basically they grow in a broad belt along the northern, eastern, southeastern, and southwestern coastlines. Eucalyptus trees are evergreen, and all have a similar leaf colour, that looks a little like aqua.
Eucalyptus means "well covered", and this refers to the cap that covers each bud until the flowers opens.
Eucalyptus trees belong to the myrtle family and are often falsely referred to as gum trees.
Gum trees have their seeds in gumnuts, which are very hard marble sized nuts containing the trees seeds.The eucalyptus oil in gum trees is highly flammable, allowing the old leaves to burn off and leaving room for new branches. The bark is designed to direct flames up the trees´s trunk to the leaves.
Eucalyptus trees are hardy and have been exported to all parts of the world.
The acacia wattle
The acacia, or wattle, owes its name to the early English settlers, who built their huts in wattle-and-daub style from acacia twings and slush.
Australia has more than 620 native species of acacia. They belong to the Leguminosae, or pod-bearing, family.
The wattles are attractive, flowering trees, whose flowers are made up of many hair like thin fingers of petal that sprout from a woody cone. These are the first flowers which burst into bright yellow blossoms in spring.
A less attractive acacia is the mulga. The small tree grows over thousands of square miles of the sparsely populated, dry inland areas.
The slang term "out in the mulga" refers to the distant outback areas. Aborigines had a variety of uses for the mulga, for example, its wood presented slow-burning fuel and they used it for their cooking fires and it was also used to make spear blades.
The most familiar acacia is the golden wattle. It is the country's floral emblem.
No less impressive are the country`s wild flowers. A bright flash in the landscape is made by the rich crimson flower heads of the tall waratah; they are sometimes more than four inches across and consist of numerous single flowers, amassed into a close terminal head. Waratah is the Aboriginal word for "shrub".
The waratah shrub varies in height from four to twelve feet, with stiff, dark green leaves from six to eight inches long. The flower is an onion shaped ball and made up of lots of little coloured finger petals and encircled by leaves.
Alexandra Honrath 13a
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