Page:Handbook of Western Australia.djvu/73

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Poison Plants.
59

the poison plants. Four of these are small shrubs.—The York road poison, which is the most common and most dangerous, the box, heart leaf and rock (the latter being found usually near granite), and the Kandinup poison, a small herbaceous plant with a blue flower, common near the South coast. The former are most dangerous in the spring of the year, especially after fires, when their green shoots tempt the cattle, or when proper food is scarce. They are easily distinguished from otherlants, and may be destroyed in enclosed lands.

The vegetation of the North is, of course, tropical, and has its own peculiar characteristics. Of these the gouty stemmed tree, in this similar to the Adansonia and to the Barriguda of Brazil, is remarkable for the swelling of the trunk, giving it a clumsy deformed appearance, yet it is valuable as affording fruit enclosed in a rind about the size of a cocoa nut; the seeds, closely resembling almonds, are very palatable, and commonly used by the natives for food; the hark yields a nutritious white gum which, Grey says, in taste and appearance resembles maccheroni, and which, when soaked in hot water, affords an agreeable mucilaginous drink. Fine trees fit for spars and timber grow on the hills, and in the gorges and ravines, through which the surface waters descend from them in clear and rapid streams. Lofty Eucalypti, with Paper Bark, and graceful pendent foliage, rise from a matted undergrowth, above which Pandanas and wild Nutmeg trees form a dense forest with rich grasses and climbing plants. The calamas or rattan is common on this coast, and leguminous plants are numerous, one at least of which is well known and cultivated in other parts of the Colony. Grey describes the trees in the valley of the Glenelg as the largest he had seen in Australia; and, from the fertility