​Greetings fellow Foxies,
 
July is a time for appreciating small plants. Sundews are actively growing and harvesting insects for their nutrients. I love seeing the sun behind them lighting up drops of sticky insect-trapping ‘glue’ and dew in the early morning.
If you know where to look, there are carpets of tiny pygmy sundews. With one exception they only occur in Australia. 

​Pygmy sundews are explosive plants!! 

There are three species in Foxes Lair.
​
The first two are perennials that have cluster bomb type (gemmae) vegetative reproduction. Gemmae are produced early in the season after leaves have formed
Gemmae are modified leaves which detach, root, and form new plants. They are produced from the rosette center, and look like a bundle of little grapes or flat scales. They become so densely packed that the old leaf stipules are pushed away from the rosette centre. This acts like the cocking of a trigger---when a single raindrop strikes the mass of gemmae, the disturbance makes the stipules flex back to their normal positions in an explosive burst, thus shooting the gemmae as far as a few meters!
They can rapidly populate bare areas of soil when the surface is wet.

​Drosera androsaceae (Cone Sundew) occurs in wetter bare spots on the clay flat north-east of the Claypit.
These are amazingly tough plants as this area is wet when it rains, but dry and hard for much of the year.
Exceptionally dry weather last summer killed many but you can still see plants dotted in protected spots

​Drosera scorpioides (Shaggy Sundew) can be found on gravelly soils underneath the jarrah trees near the seat. The shaggy description is apt because they live for over a decade and develop a shaggy coat of dead tendril leaves as they grow up through the leaf litter. This and aerial micro stilt roots that elevate the plant above the soil surface make them admirably adapted to dry gravelly soils

​​They are very successful ant catchers. Lots of the plants had many tendrils curled, or slowly curling around captured ants

​ Perennial sundews produce flowers, but most fail to produce viable seed.

​Drosera glanduligera (Pimpernel sundew) is the only annual sundew. It only occurs on one small spot near the Granite Walk but is fairly common on shallow moist soils on and around granite rocks.
It is explosive in another way! Its tendrils close so quickly that it might just be the fastest moving plant in the world. (check out the video on this link)
Tendrils move faster than the eye can see: a couple of hundredths of a second. "And an ant or prey will walk on that gland and the gland will actually flick it into the centre of the leaf. There is no escape."
Amazing for a plant that is no more than 6cm tall. Minute, deadly and beautiful

Greetings fellow Foxies,
July is the time that species of the Rhamnaceae (Buckthorn) family first flower in Foxes Lair. Like many of the June-July flowering wildflowers here, the flowers are tiny (about 3mm) and insignificant if you don’t have a lens or macro camera to see their delicate form.
Cryptandra nutans, the first to flower is a little shrub about 30cm high on the gravelly Banksia Walk trail.
The name Cryptandra (Latin – hiding man) refers to the anthers that are cloaked by a hood on the petals

Trymalium ledifolium is a medium sized shrub with soft green leaves that can form clusters on rocky red loams and granitic sandy soils near the claypit. Flowering starts in mid-July with sprays of minuscule pale-yellow flowers and dark green foliage in August. Trymalium comes from Greek for "the eye of a needle", which refers to the three slits at the summit of the fruit when it opens.

​Cryptandra arbutifolia is uncommon on granitic sandy soils in Foxes Lair. It flowers in September-October when it is dwarfed by the mass of other wildflowers at this time.
The tiny flowers are exquisite, particularly with the sun behind them.

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.

​Greetings fellow Foxies,
 
To paraphrase Tom Gleeson, this year I am really into roots.
 For years I noticed that Kickbush (Astroloma acervatum, previously named Astroloma pallidum) often had dead or stressed patches, in its otherwise healthy neat little clump.
Recently I read about rootstock splitting in Astrolomas in the thrilling (for me)  book “Unravelling the Secret Lives of Plant Root Systems”
 
Aha, a new project for Detective Doug!

In most plants the main stem and taproot is a single cylinder containing the conducting vessels for water up to the branches (xylem), and sugars down from the branches to the roots (phloem). When the roots run out of water the whole plant is affected.
A rootstock splitting plant has a bundle of individual cylinders each with a bark coating that connect from a lateral (side) root to a side branch. Sort of like the insulated wires in an electric cable. If the soil on one side of the plant is particularly dry, only the branch fed by roots from that side are affected

Kickbush plants form mounded mats on relatively open areas in sands or gravels. They have amazing adaptations for poor and shallow soils. These include

• Rootstock splitting root system
• Both a deep tap root and shallow woody lateral roots
• A unique ericoid mycorrhiza consisting of long root hairs growing out of the woody roots, which become infected by fungi, which greatly increases the plant’s effective root area.
• Tough and spiny leaves that can become yellow and dormant in summer
• Prostrate stems that spread along the ground and send up vertical twigs to form a mat that traps soil and leaves. This reduces the surface soil temperature and help the plant retain moisture.

To enable pollination and seed distribution over a distance, Kickbush has: -

• Tubular flowers that are pollinated by native bees (that can fly further than European honeybees) using buzz pollination.
• Seed are drupes (berries) that are eaten by birds and animals and spread in their dung. They are bush tucker and the Kickbush name comes from early settlers kicking the prostrate bushes over to look for ripe berries underneath (Noongars use a stick to pick through the leaves).

 
             Interesting little plants

I found three dead plants: one had been killed by a borer and the others apparently from old age.
​A section through the top of one shows why they are called ‘mound plants’

​Another dead plant that I excavated had two sedges alongside it. The large sedge (Lepidosperma brunonium) in the image below had a very vigourous root system that separated from the Kickbush on excavation.
 
I took the excavated plant home and washed it out to remove soil and trapped debris.
The bottom image below showing a side view of the washed Kickbush shows the relatively small taproot with large lateral roots radiating out just below the surface. The laterals would have sent out smaller roots to explore for gaps in the dense or gravelly subsoils and produce the long root hairs that were colonised by fungi in the growing season.

​I took the excavated plant home and washed it out to remove soil and trapped debris.
The image below showing a side view of the washed Kickbush shows the relatively small taproot with large lateral roots radiating out just below the surface. The laterals would have sent out smaller roots to explore for gaps in the dense or gravelly subsoils and produce the long root hairs that were colonised by fungi in the growing season.
Above the soil surface main stems radiating out in a circle produced upward facing foliage that trapped debris. Washing the plant was no mean feat as one side of the kickbush had been colonised by densely packed cluster roots from the small sedge
The thin ‘root’ projecting below the root on the left is a sedge rhizome (underground stem) that ran below the soil surface to shoots and the root mass in the Kickbush

Sand binding roots are common in monocotyledons (grasses rushes and sedges) in sandy soils in the Australian bush, but I have never noticed them before.
 They were amazingly dense and resisted concentrated blasting from the hose.