​Hello fellow Foxies,
Tiny (1cm) delightful blue Tall Lobelia Lobelia gibbosa flowers are out now. Each single stemmed plant has small, withered leaves on a fleshy stem with one to four pale blue striped flowers that are hard to spot, but is worth the search.
The larger Tufted Lobelia Lobelia rhombifolia (October/November) also has (deep) blue flowers that remind me of a fleur-de-lis. They are hardy annuals that only occur in ones or twos, mostly and sandy spots with little vegetation. I think they would flourish after a fire.

​Lobelias belong to the Campanulaceae family with two other late-spring annuals in Foxes Lair, Isotoma hypercrateriformis and Wahlenbergia gracilenta (rare here) that occur in the claypit area.

​World-wide the Campanulaceae family is known for large and showy flowers, but not in WA.
They share these distinctive features.

• Inferior (under the flower) ovary.
• They exude a nasty sticky white sap when cut.
• Instead of starch they store energy as inulin. Unlike starch, inulin is digested in the colon rather than in the stomach, and is very good for gut health. Before you harvest lobelias for the inulin, note that it may cause gaseous eruptions in the bowel department (a curse on Jerusalem artichokes!), and:-
• Some plants contain toxins. The common name for Isotoma hypercrateriformis is Woodbridge poison.
• Some plants like Lobelia gibbosa and Isotoma hypercrateriformis have fleshy stems that enable flower and seed formation to continue long after the leaves have died.
• Campanulaceae and Asteraceae (sunflower family) have a remarkable stigma and stamen arrangement that is described in the extract below from this web page.

 
Inside the flower, the five stamens are arranged closely together around the central female style and are often fused together, thus forming a little cylinder. When they are mature, the stamens release their pollen into the centre of the tube they form, where the pollen collects. The style will then grow longer, slowly pushing the mass of pollen out of the tube, where it then falls on the backs of bees that visit the flower for nectar. Once all the pollen is pushed out and the female style is mature, the tip will split open to reveal sticky surfaces where it can receive pollen from other flowers. In other words, the flower will not pollinate itself, because the pollen is released and pushed out of the way before it is ready to be pollinated.
After much crawling around on tick-infested ground I managed to photograph this arrangement in Lobelia gibbosa. From the flower base, the tube curves up through a split in the upper petals and down again to end where it will brush the back of insects entering the flower. 

​Upper petals have been removed from the images below to show the fused stamen tube.

​Greetings fellow Foxies
I have been sampling the tasty purple berries of Dianella revoluta/ Blueberry lily. It is bush tucker with an edible fleshy berry containing two small nutty seeds. Dianellas are called flax lilies (Noongar name is Mangard) because fibre from the stiff linear leaves makes a handy string or cord for binding. Noongars also crushed and ate the rhizomes.
When I googled Dianella plant I was surprised to see that nurseries have produced new cultivars for the garden.

Similar looking lilies that flower within a month or so of each other include:

• Stypandra glauca/Blind grass is a member of the grass lily genus with a similar looking flower. However, it is a toxic to introduced grazing animals, and the fruit is a dry capsule rather than a berry.
• Agrostocrinum scabrum/ Blue grass lily occcurs on gravels.It has a deep blue flower and a dry capsule rather than a berry
• Dichopogon callipes is an early summer flowering plant with a few small straight leaves on the stem and  delicate blue flowers. It is normally inconspicuous, but a delight to see in mornings when the sun is behind it.

Despite being called lilies, they are part of a group of varied monocotyledons that were apparently once in the family Liliaceae, but were regrouped by taxonomists, with some disputes (remember Dryandra/Banksia?).
No doubt forests have been felled for journal articles and careers have waxed and waned during the lily wars. I assume that microscopes and DNA analysis are the main weapons as  plants do not possess anal hairs. I digress.
From a layman’s view they are all monocotyledons (generally 3 petals, 3 sepals) with rhizomes and/or root tubers. All three plants are resprouters that can recover from fires using energy reserves stored in their roots.
Agrostocrinum, Dianella and Stypandra are in the Hemerocallidaceae family with other Foxes Lair genera Caesia,and Tricoryne.
Dichopogon is in the large Asparagaceae family, which includes all our orchids and (you guessed it) asparagus.

Bridal Creeper is a South African member of Asparagaceae and a weed in that is slowly increasing throughout Foxes Lair
It is an aggressive competitor due to

• A climbing and spreading growth habit
• Profuse berry production. I frequently find small bridal creeper plants at the base of trees in the bush, that have germinated from seeds that passed through birds.
• A huge ability to recover from adversity using root reserves. 90% of the plant occurs underground as a mat of rhizomes and root tubers. Control by cultivation and pulling has no effect.

​Like many pests and weeds, bridal creeper is relatively uncommon in its home country due to native diseases and pests that have evolved with the plant.
This year I thought I would kill some plants in the arboretum using two applications of a glyphosate and metsulfuron. 
Images below show that sprayed plants had more shrivelled old (brown) root tubers but survived, and produced (less) new season tubers and set seed. 

For small outbreaks, digging the tubers out is very effective. The tuber clump holds together and can be hoiked out intact if you get under it with a mattock.
​Unfortunately, Narrogin’s climate is too dry for the introduced bridal creeper rust to persist, and introduced mites are unlikely to have much impact on plants dispersed in the bush. It is going to be a long battle.

​Greetings fellow Foxies,
 
My journey into underground plant parts continues.
Rhizomes are basically underground stems, which are particularly common in monocotyledons. Domestic examples are your lawn, ginger and turmeric.
Basically, stem like roots radiate out from the seedling plant that have nodes at regular intervals. Each node sprouts roots and a vegetative shoot called a culm that forms a flower.
Rhizomes are common in the bush, particularly on sedges, rushes and native grasses. These plants can live for decades. The central parent plant often dies as clones radiate outwards to form a circle. Spinifex is a great example.
In the image of a yellow kangaroo paw from my garden, fleshy rhizomes store starch to maintain the plant over summer when the culms often die off, and to help produce new culms as flowers on the old ones mature and die.

​As a very general rule of thumb there are two main types of rhizomatous plants.
• Ones with horizontal rhizomes that spread underground, which enables them to survive severe fires. Members of this group have the fleshy rhizomes and often occur in large patches.
• Ones with more vertical rhizomes that form very clumpy plants that are less fire tolerant. These tend to be more common in less fire-prone areas like wetlands and may have other features that protect them from fire.

​Have you noticed how difficult it can be to shake the sand off grass weeds after you pull them out? Many monocotyledons have sand binding roots. These secrete a gum from their roots to form a sandy ‘armour’ that helps to protect them from heat, drying and perhaps root chewing insects. Australian native plants produce very tough long-lasting sand binding root covers that persist long after the plant has died and provide important protection against erosion.

Kangaroo paws (Genus Anigozanthus) have rhizomes and sand binding roots.Two local plants in the Anigozanthus genus are Cat Paw Anigozanthus humilis (common on sandy soils) and the Little Kangaroo Paw Anigozanthus bicolor (found at Highbury B Block)

Greetings fellow Foxies,
 
 “Unravelling the Secret Lives of Plant Root Systems” has explained another interesting feature of our local bush: Large groups of the same small perennial plants amidst an otherwise diverse shrub understorey.
These plants usually reproduce vegetatively rather than from seed.
It all comes back to plant strategies for coping with fire.
Some plants only reproduce sexually by seed (obligate seeders) and some only asexually by vegetative growth (obligate resprouters) and many do both.
Root suckering plants send shoots (to become plants) up from spreading root systems that are deep enough to be protected from fire.
They tend to be more common on fire-prone sandy surfaced soils.  and in higher rainfall areas.
 As resprouters don’t rely on fire for seed germination, they can outcompete seeders in the absence of fire. A downside is that each resprouter plant is a clone, putting them at risk of extinction when conditions change. They overcome this by being very-long lived with plants commonly living for 50 to 100 years. Some resprouters live to 1000! During this time random mutations enable create the genetic variation that enables change.
Common Popflower Glischrocaryon aureum produces few fertile seeds, along with clonal members of the Goodeniaceae family (Goodenias, Dampieras). All those lovely flowers for the the pollinators but few  seeds!

In the image below lines of white Goodenia/Goodenia scapigera clones that have sprouted from lateral roots in Foxes Lair.

Another example is Persoonia quinquinervis. Persoonias are the only members of the Proteacea family that rely on mycorrhizae instead of cluster roots to enhance water and nutrient uptake.

​Here is a strange one. There are three patches of quandongs (Santalum acuminatum) in Foxes Lair. they flower annually but I have never found a nut. When a fire swept through one side of a clump that was bisected by a road there was no difference in density between burnt and unburnt sides. This indicated to me that there was no seed germination in the unburnt side. They must all be clones.