Rare undescribed plants

[elephantnose3334]

Hi @Colin_T,

I had an urge to talk about this subject but it's about the rarest plants in the Wildflower State, two of an undescribed species of plant that you collected from a bush area. Is it okay to do some art on them to see what they looked like in real life, with your permission? I'm no plant expert but the plants you collected were very interesting. There are rare plants in Western Australia, but those two undescribed plants were probably the rarest in the state. I wish I saw them, but I was too young and lived somewhere else in Perth. Will the local bush have undescribed plant species? How can I find new plant species in the bush?

Plants, like animals, are fascinating. I wish I kept rare plants though...

 

[Colin_T]

I don't have any pictures of the 2 plants that got thrown out. If you want to try and draw them, go for it but without a picture to guide you, it's going to be hard to get it right.

It's unlikely there will be undescribed species found locally in Perth and the surrounding suburbs because other people will have looked and found them. However, if you go out into the hills past Armadale or down south, there are still plants, animals and insects yet to be discovered.

To find new species you simply look and take pictures. Then you try to identify those plants from the pictures and when you find something you can't identify from a book or online, you contact the WA Herbarium and see if anyone there can ID it. You can also take the picture to a plant nursery and they can sometimes ID plants that aren't in books.

 

[elephantnose3334]

I don't have any pictures of the 2 plants that got thrown out. If you want to try and draw them, go for it but without a picture to guide you, it's going to be hard to get it right.

It's unlikely there will be undescribed species found locally in Perth and the surrounding suburbs because other people will have looked and found them. However, if you go out into the hills past Armadale or down south, there are still plants, animals and insects yet to be discovered.

To find new species you simply look and take pictures. Then you try to identify those plants from the pictures and when you find something you can't identify from a book or online, you contact the WA Herbarium and see if anyone there can ID it. You can also take the picture to a plant nursery and they can sometimes ID plants that aren't in books.

I'll go for it. With your great memory of the undescribed plants, on what they looked like to you, I will go for it. So I'll have to do the rarest species of plant in the Western Australia from memory. They had a pink flower, grassy leaves and a tall flower stalk, and went dormant over the summer, right?

 

[Colin_T]

They had a long flower stalk that went out sideways from the plant (not upwards), and it had tiny pink star shaped flowers on it space about 4 inches apart. The flowers were about the size of your little fingernail (assuming you don't have really long nails).

The leaves were grass like but dark green and grew about 12 inches long x 6-8 mm wide. They grew out of a central point and there were lots of leaves. The leaves drooped over and the plant was only about 4-6 inches high but it had long leaves that went up a bit and then curved gently back down.