Australian Wildflowers

It is going to be a LONG and SLOW process , many flowers have different colours within the same species, a lot of Australian wildflowers have still to be identified and named.

That is why some botanical knowledge is required and why identifying flowers from photos can be difficult.

I would name those you can as a start then work on finding names for the others. Join a wildflower society if you can. I think there are a few online.

State and local museums also provide a service but they will name a few if they can not 1,500 !

your local library will also have flower ID books available.

There are also Australian wildflower groups on photo sites like Flickr you can post photos and ask for information there.

I use all these sources in a variety of ways to ID flowers and plant photos and still I fail to ID some of them.

Hi Pete,

Last year in WA I do recall seeing for sale a set of wildflower books arranged on the basis of colour. I didn't pay much attention as I had a pretty good set of books with me, and using colour as a starting point is not a method that I would use unless there was no other option. I confess to having a fair amount of knowledge about how to identify plants/flowers, although I'm a bit rusty.

Before our trip to WA last year I searched eBay for wildflower books and bought quite a few very cheaply - by using these I was able to identify most of the hundreds/thousands of flowers that we photographed at least down to genus level (I'm not too fussed about species level and for some genera its a bit pointless anyway as the taxonomic work is incomplete).

I would be very interested to see some of your photos - do you have them up on the web somewhere. Might be able to give you a pointer on some of the names.

Cheers,

Val

Hi Pete,

You have set yourself quite a challenge, but hopefully you will find it enjoyable and rewarding. Wildflowers can really get you hooked.

You don't say whether your pics are from all over the country or mostly in one state. In Kings Park, Perth, last year I picked up a book called "Colour Guide to Spring Wildflowers of Western Australia" by Eddy Wajon. Part 1 is Kalbarri and the Goldfields, Part 2 is Perth and the Southwest, and Part 3 is Esperance and the Wheatbelt. The most useful book I have for WA is "Wildflowers of Southern Western Australia , Margaret G Corrick and Bruce A Furher. "Guide to the Wildflowers of Western Australia" (Simon Nevill Publications) is popular and the photography is good but I found it slightly annoying for some reason. "A Guide to Plants of Inland Australia" by Phillip Moore is an excellent book which covers most of Australia except the east coast, far southwest and far north, and is quite informative. You could make yourself poor buying books unless you buy secondhand.

We found the only way to keep on top of naming the plants was to get back to camp at night and look at them on the laptop with the books at hand. Fortunately both of us are interested. The most important thing is to know where the photo was taken and what time of year.

As already suggested, if your join your local Australian Native Plant Society (formerly known as Society for Growing Australian Plants) I'm sure you will find some very knowledgeable people who will help you out. Just don't expect anyone to sit down and look at them all in one session!

Good luck,

Min

Thanks for the advice folks......I'll try and source some of those references and keep plodding along. I'm happy if I can get a coupla three identified each day :-)

For WA, a good start can be made by using the FloraBase sitehttp://florabase.calm.wa.gov.au/ but to really be effective you do need to be able to at least recognise by sight major genus' such as hakea, davisia etc.

We learn't by buying a few field guides and then going out on trips to see, say, how many hakeas we could find, then identify. It's really worth the effort to put in some early hard yards as it makes wildflower appreciation much more satisfying IMO.

Our first start was eucalypts in Fitzgerald NP 35 years ago which was very rewarding as the park has so many euc species - we came away with a list of about 40 identified species over a week! Next trip it was banksias etc etc.

Cheers.