Recreating the Country
  • Home
  • be Challenged
    • Design to restore lost biodiversity >
      • Diversity >
        • Making a list of plants for revegetation
      • Structure >
        • Ecology Snapshot - wildlife and their habitat
      • Species survival
      • Location - connections
      • Blueprint for Recreating the Counrty
    • Biodiversity and profit >
      • Designing for profit
    • Managing sustainable biorich landscapes
  • be Informed
    • Indigenous flora of the Geelong district >
      • Indigenous plants - what & why
      • Acacias, wattles of the Geelong Region
      • Acacias - the cafes of the bush
      • Allocasuarinas/drooping sheoaks, Black Sheoak & Callitris glaucophylla/cypress-pine
      • Bursaria spinosa, Sweet Bursaria
      • Eucalypts, The Sentinals
      • Exocarpos cupressiformis, Cherry Ballart
      • Moonah, Melaleuca lanceolata
      • Small riparian myrtles
      • Wedge-leaf/Giant Hop-bush, Dodonaea viscosa
      • Wild Plants of Inverleigh
      • Tree Violet - as tenacious as a terrier
    • Nurseryman's diary >
      • Regent Honeyeater - a good news story
      • Give me a home among the gum trees
      • Symbiotic fungi
      • The joys of seed collecting
      • Landcare, who cares?
      • The last Silver Banksia
      • Neds Corner
      • River Red Gums and the Tuscan monks
  • be Entertained
    • Stories for children >
      • Amie and the intoxicated kangaroos
      • The Little Green Caterpillar
      • B'emus'ed - a Christmas tale of bursairas and emus
    • Stories about the natural world >
      • Brushtail
      • Cormorant
      • Eastern Bettongs. 'Truffle junkies' or 'ecosystem engineers'
      • Richards Sweet Rewards
      • Coxy's Curse
      • How the River Red Gum came to be - A dreamtime story
  • RtC bookshop
  • Blog
    • Easy blog finder
  • Contact

Indigenous flora
​of the Geelong district

The Geelong district in the far south of Victoria offers a variety of landscapes, geologies and soils. In the extraordinary Barrabool Hills immediately to the west of Geelong you will see fertile sandy loam soils that have developed from an ancient sandstone. This is a landscape of steep hills and fertile valleys.  Further west is the relatively flat Victorian Volcanic Plains which are the result of lava flows. These rocks have produced nutrient rich clay soils that often shrink and crack in summer. To the east is the beautiful undulating Bellarine Peninsular with its mix of leached marine sediment soils and rich older basalt clay loam soils. Add to this variable geology, the abrupt imposing granite landscape features of the You Yangs and the Dog Rocks, producing more open sandy loam soils, and you have a fascinating and diverse mix of indigenous vegetation that has evolved on the unique soils that time and weathering has produced.

​The plants described are found on and have adapted to all these landscapes and soils and in doing so they have become subtly different. For example the magnificent Blackwood, Acacia melanoxylon, grows into a very large long lived tree in the high rainfall areas and in the river valleys on the better drained soils. On the heavy cracking soils of the basalt plains the Blackwood has become a small tree with a relatively short lifespan. It is the same species of wattle that has adapted to its surroundings over thousands of years and it now looks like two different species. 
 
Australian plants are remarkable and have adapted to some of the poorest soils and harshest climates in the world. These stories are about these wonderful plants.  Written to entertain, inform and to inspire Landcare members to care for a landscape feature that is critical to our environmental health but is sadly disappearing from the roadsides and other remnant areas around Geelong a little more each year.  

You can read about the local plants by clicking on acacia (wattle); banksia; bursaria; casuarina (sheoak); callitris (cypress pine); Cherry Ballart; Wedge-leaf Hop-bush; gum (eucalyptus); melaleuca (moonah); Tree Violet

You can also read about other indigenous plants of the Geelong region described in a recent popular blog series -
​
Connecting with nature one plant at a time: 
Chocolate Lily; Berry Saltbush; Golden Wattle;  Gold-dust Wattle; Black Wattle; Black Wood; Snow Gum;
Drooping Sheoak; Kangaroo Grass.


City of Greater Geelong has an excellent web site page with a 'zoned' map of indigenous plants of the Geelong region plus lists of indigenous plants for each zone. Its a very useful resource for discovering your local plants and for preparing planting lists:  www.geelongaustralia.com.au/indigenousplants/article/item/8ce589e1bce0fe8.aspx 

If you want more ideas on developing a plant list for your project please have a look at
making a list of plants for revegetation.

A view of the Barrabool Hills,  Barwon River valley with extensive flood plain and the Victorian Volcanic Plains beyond, at the end of the dry summer of 2015

Within these hills there are many contrasting micro-climates to which the indigenous plants have adapted well.
​
​The local birds depend on the diversity of these local plants to survive in these often harsh environments.

Picture
Picture

Site content © Stephen Murphy, 20​24

  • Home
  • be Challenged
    • Design to restore lost biodiversity >
      • Diversity >
        • Making a list of plants for revegetation
      • Structure >
        • Ecology Snapshot - wildlife and their habitat
      • Species survival
      • Location - connections
      • Blueprint for Recreating the Counrty
    • Biodiversity and profit >
      • Designing for profit
    • Managing sustainable biorich landscapes
  • be Informed
    • Indigenous flora of the Geelong district >
      • Indigenous plants - what & why
      • Acacias, wattles of the Geelong Region
      • Acacias - the cafes of the bush
      • Allocasuarinas/drooping sheoaks, Black Sheoak & Callitris glaucophylla/cypress-pine
      • Bursaria spinosa, Sweet Bursaria
      • Eucalypts, The Sentinals
      • Exocarpos cupressiformis, Cherry Ballart
      • Moonah, Melaleuca lanceolata
      • Small riparian myrtles
      • Wedge-leaf/Giant Hop-bush, Dodonaea viscosa
      • Wild Plants of Inverleigh
      • Tree Violet - as tenacious as a terrier
    • Nurseryman's diary >
      • Regent Honeyeater - a good news story
      • Give me a home among the gum trees
      • Symbiotic fungi
      • The joys of seed collecting
      • Landcare, who cares?
      • The last Silver Banksia
      • Neds Corner
      • River Red Gums and the Tuscan monks
  • be Entertained
    • Stories for children >
      • Amie and the intoxicated kangaroos
      • The Little Green Caterpillar
      • B'emus'ed - a Christmas tale of bursairas and emus
    • Stories about the natural world >
      • Brushtail
      • Cormorant
      • Eastern Bettongs. 'Truffle junkies' or 'ecosystem engineers'
      • Richards Sweet Rewards
      • Coxy's Curse
      • How the River Red Gum came to be - A dreamtime story
  • RtC bookshop
  • Blog
    • Easy blog finder
  • Contact