What’s in stock?
The Maleny Community Nursery at Porters Lane is currently flush with a range of quality native plants.
Perfect for your native Garden for Wildlife
The nursery is especially abundant with paper daisies ready for your native gardening project this winter.
Xerochrysum bracteatum (everlasting or paper daisy) is a beautiful native flowering plant perfect for rockeries and the sunny nooks and crannies of your native garden for wildlife. It can also be planted as a feature flowering plant in a container in your courtyard, sunny balcony or other small spaces around your yard. It can also be used as a spectacular groundcover or border plant when landscaping.
You can see this plant nestled in amongst the rocks at the Barung Seed Forest in Maleny at the moment (featured image above). Paper daisies flower winter to summer and are perfect for brightening up your garden through the darker days of the year.
This annual plant thrives and flowers well in a full sun position and is easy to grow in well drained soil. Reasonably drought tolerant and disease resistant, it is a great Australian plant. In fact it is one of the most widely grown native flowers and is widely used for cut flowers.
The flowers attract butterflies, bees, moths and many other pollinating insects, providing an important food source and habitat for them, therefore playing an important ecological role in any garden they are planted.
Paper daisies are not only a perfect addition to a sunny garden for wildlife, but the flowers can also be dried and are very long lasting.
Perfect for your landscaping or revegetation project
A new arrival into the nursery now, is the Canary Beech or Huberantha nitidissima which has recently been reclassified, with a name change from Polyalthia nitidissima.
Nurseries Manager Cam Burton first became familiar with this stately small tree (to 12 m) walking the Tramway track on the Buderim plateau. In this sandstone country it grows in dense stands in the rainforest gullies (RE 12.9-10-16) and intermittently on the wet sclerophyll slopes (12.9-10.14).
In Buderim, it also grows on a red soil basalt cap above the ‘Serenity Falls’ in Buderim Forest Park (RE 12.8.3). Locally, it is also recorded occurring in the Maleny National Park and around Kenilworth on poorer soils that support rainforests. Outside of our region, Canary Beech occurs naturally in New Guinea and New Caledonia, and in Australia, in the NT and down the East coast, from Cape York to Northern NSW. It is more prevalent in Littoral (Coastal) Rainforest but is also found further inland in Subtropical Rainforest.
The features of this tree that first catch the eye are the overall slightly conical shape and the distinctive horizontal branches that hold glossy dark green leaves. These features make it an excellent specimen for parks or street trees. A close look at the underside of the leaves shows quite obvious tufts of brown hairs in the vein angles (domatia) which is a main diagnostic identification feature of the plant.
These Beech fruited well about four years ago but the seeds collected, from the ground, failed to germinate, most likely due to the fruits being predated by grubs.
There was a gap of three years before, in March 21, they fruited heavily again. With a change of plan, this time Cam collected the ripe fruit from straight from the tree and placed them quickly into water to drown any grubs. With this batch there was success! With a germination rate of about 70%.
In the garden or the forest they are a beautiful small tree that will provide a dense canopy to shelter wildlife and protect understory species. The bisexual, scented yellow flowers have elegant, elongated petals in whorls of 6 and the following clusters of attractive, ripe red fruits are a plentiful food source for frugivorous birds in good seasons.
Download our monthly stock list
Looking to get into a planting project after all this rain? You can download the monthly stock list from our nursery page on the website.
Behind the scenes
A lot of work goes on behind the scenes in our native nurseries to bring you quality tubestock for your revegetation projects and native gardens for wildlife. From collecting and propagating seed, to general care and maintenance of the nurseries, it’s a joy to work with our staff and volunteers to make sure our community and project partners have access to a diversity of species that truly make a positive difference when planted back into the local environment.
Thank you volunteers!
And of course, our volunteers carry out a great deal of this work.
We would especially like to mention the work of Peter Milton recently who is working with our staff to extract and collate content that has been written by the Barung community about our local plants since Barung started in 1989! That’s over 30 years of material!
Peter and Megan (our Education and Communications Officer) will work together to put these profiles into a format that can be accessed and used by the community in the digital age we now exist in. It will be a big job, so bear with us while we undertake this mammoth task, we look forward to bringing you a new resource out of this work, and reviving some of the great work our members have done in the past.
Interested in volunteering with us? Volunteering offers many rewards for those who join us. Fill out an application form below to express your interest.