This plant doesn’t really belong on a blog about Toowoomba plants at all, as it is not native here.
I decided to include it, however, out of affection for my old school at Southport, one of whose houses is called “Karragaroo”. The lovely old Aboriginal name for this equally lovely plant seems destined to be lost in the mists of time, so I decided to put it on the internet in the hope of reviving it.
The plant itself grows in coastal areas, from Fraser Island to Sydney, and would have been common in Southport at the time the school was founded in 1912.
The only other public record of the word “Karragaroo” that I can find is in the name of a historic home in Ipswich, built in 1883, and of the street in which it is situated. It is now a National Trust home and documentation there does say that the word means “grasstree”, but fails to record that it referred to this particular trunkless species, Xanthorrhoea macronema. Nowadays it is more often called "bottlebrush grasstree”, which is descriptive, but does lack the romance of the old name.
Most of our grasstrees are known for their tall spikes of tiny white flowers. Karragaroos' showy spikes, however, end in short, chunky, creamy-yellow flowerheads with long, soft stamens.
They are rich in nectar, and attracting honeyeaters, butterflies, and native bees.
When not flowering, the plants simply look like rather anonymous clumps of shiny green grass. In the wild you can fail to notice them at all, which is no doubt why so many of them have disappeared under developers' bulldozers. In early summer, however, they put up their head-high spikes, and make a great show.
Because the plants themselves are rather small, it would be easy to fit a good number of them into a garden, where they would make a spectacular display in the season.They could make very appealing garden edges, or be tucked into the back of perennial borders, to go unnoticed until flowering time.
They like well-drained soil, and full sun or part shade. The light, dappled shade under eucalypts is perfect for them.
Hi Patricia, I'm just wondering if the Southport school you mention is St Hilda's? I went there for one year in 1977 and was in Karragaroo House. I've long since wondered exactly what plant it actually was. Thankyou for your information.
ReplyDeleteHello Anonymous.
ReplyDeleteIt is nice to talk to another "Old Girl" (What a hideous expression!).
I always thought it was a pity that the interest that had been shown by the Misses Bourne in Botany had reached such a low ebb by the sixties that the knowledge of the plants the school houses were named after had either been forgotten completely, or that whoever retained the knowledge didn't think it was worth telling the school pupils what the names of their houses actually meant. i didn't know what a Melaleuca was either, until the craze for growing natives in gardens reached Queensland in about 1970.
My mother, also an "old girl" of the school (from the 1930s) belonged to a Darling Downs family which went to what was later called Surfers Paradise each year, after the wheat harvest was in, for a beach holiday.
In her early childhood before the Jubilee Bridge was built, they would drive off the car ferry which at that time crossed the Nerang at the western end of the road which later became Cavill Avenue. They drove straight from drive onto an unmade road of pure sand, which threaded its way under a continuous arch of Melaleuca tree branches. They would have called them tea trees at that time. That actual piece of ground was destroyed by canals and horrible housing estates in the sixties, though the original course of the river may be more or less still in place?
I think the Melaleuca would have been the lovely big paperbark, M. quinquinervia, although M.sieberi would also have been there. The Banksia would have been Banksia integrifolia of course.
All now long gone, though I remember from my own fifties childhood (holidays at Broadbeach) when the Nerang River was in its original state, and there was wallum from Britannia Avenue to the south. That was cleared completely by bulldozer in the fifties, leaving a wasteland of blowing sand.
Alas for the loss of all those wonderful karragaroo plants. I wonder how many of them, if any, can now be found in Gold Coast gardens.
Are there any in the gardens at St. Hilda's?
all the best.
Trish