Tim Entwisle's Top 10 Favourite

I'm forever ‘discovering’ new plants as they come into flower or someone tells me yet another intriguing plant story.

My affections shift from day to day, week to week and season to season. But when Clive asks, how can I refuse?

I have stuck to what we call vascular plants.  There are plenty of other plant-like things I could have mentioned but they are either non-vascular (mosses), more closely related to animals than plants (fungi) or scattered variously through the tree of life (algae, such as Entwisleia).  I notice I haven't included any ferns but rest assured some would be in my top 20!

A fascinating conifer known from the fossil record but discovered alive in a canyon north of Sydney in only 1994.  I was Executive Director of the Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust when the first 100 plants were auctioned by Sotherby's and during my time their I loved telling the story of why its location was kept secret (to keep out fire and disease) and how bringing it into cultivation would help save the species (it's now distributed around the world).

This tree also got me interested in other members of the family Araucariaceae and it was fun to visit recently the Monkey Puzzle Tree (Araucaria araucana) in its native habitat near Pucon, in Chile.

This is an unusual and rare tree I also grew to love in Sydney's Royal Botanic Garden.  Although this particular specimen was planted by Queen Victoria's son Prince Alfred in 1868, the species name imperiale is a reference to its impressive leaves and perhaps (like the genus name) also to its golden (to rusty tawny) tinged new growth.

Earlier this year, on my trip to South America, I saw another fine specimen in the botanic garden of Buenos Aires (Jardín Botánico Carlos Thays).  The species itself is extremely rare and probably extinct in its natural habitat around Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

In fact while I was in Sydney we were approached for seed for restoration.  I forgot on my visit to Jardim Botanico do Rio de Janeiro to ask about this but found out later they have four plants, all ‘young, but strong’ plus a few waiting to be planted out.  I'm presuming these are from seed sent from Sydney.

The bark of the mature tree is stunning — just search for ‘Rainbow Gum’ in your favourite search engine and marvel at the colourful images online (this picture from a tree in the Burle Marx garden just out of Rio de Janeiro doesn't have the full complement of colours yet).

We've just planted three at the end of Fern Gully in the Melbourne Gardens of Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. I'm hoping in this location they can survive our cool winters and dry summers.  Don't tell Clive Blazey but I'm fond of many eucalypts.  I particularly like the character of old river red gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) and the quirky flowers and fruits of the mallees (which I remember from my childhood holidays with cousins in Hopetoun, in north-west Victoria).

These spider orchids are pollinated by male wasps tricked by perfumes (pheromones) and mimicry by parts of the flower to look like a female wasp.  The flowers are quite transient and hard to find so it’s fun to go orchid hunting: hunting for photographs of course.

I came across these flowers on a path through Dunedin Botanic Gardens a couple of years ago.  The name Monkey Hand Tree seemed particularly apt.  You don’t see it often outside botanic gardens but in flower it’s hard to miss.  It’s in the same plant family as our Brachychiton (e.g. kurrajong and bottletree), with that distinctive hairiness found in many of the species in that genus.

I know Clive likes this one.  It does brilliantly in glasshouses in Australia and outdoors in places such as where this picture (showing how the locals wear them!) was taken, in Dalat, in central Vietnam.

There are other vines with similar bold flowers (e.g. Mucuna bennettii, the New Guinea creeper or scarlet Jade Vine) but the turquoise or jade colour sets these apart.

I'm patron of the Cactus and Succulent Society of Australia and whenever I give a talk to the group (often on something only tangentially related to succulents) I'll buy a Lithops, Tillandsia or some other quirky succulent to grow on my windowsill at work. I can't grow this one there but I fell in love with it during a visit to South Africa ten years ago.

I particularly remember the deep red blotches where the leaves join and how they were picked up in the morning light in the Harold Porter Botanic Garden here at Betty Bay (although it's not obvious in my picture of Betty Bay's large plant, and a bit pinkish in the glasshouse plant photographed at Kew Gardens in London).

I first enjoyed the size and colour of this bromeliad flower in the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden at Mount Tomah, one of the gardens I looked after in Sydney.  Since then I've seen it in other botanic gardens and most recently in its native habitat near Santiago in Chile.  I was visiting a fledgling botanic garden named after this plant (Chagual) but sadly all I saw were spent flower blooms emerging from this and another species of Puja growing amongst Chilean wine palms (another for the top 20).

I can't leave out this big, stinky bloom.  I like to argue it's the biggest flower in the world (just one of the topics I've covered in my blog Talking Plants (talkingplants.blogspot.com.au — search ‘Titan Arum’) although I'm keen to also grow another contender for the title, Rafflesia (more on that in my blog too).

The Titan Arum flower comes straight out of a giant tuber, weighing up to 100 kg or more, just like a massive bulb (or arum of course) of some kind.  The tuber produces a 2-3 metre high single leaf every year or so, eventually deciding it has enough fuel to produce a flower.  The rotten smell (like a dead possum) attracts flies and carrion beetles for pollination.

In Sydney I’m better known for chopping down Moreton Bay Figs than appreciating their beauty but a good botanic gardens’ director can do both.  I love the buttressing roots and massive presence they bring to a park or broad roadside.  There are two forms, with the usually single-stemmed one from mainland Australia (f. macrophylla) the most commonly planted.  The Lord Howe Island variant (f. collumnaris) is a great excuse to visit that botanically (and otherwise) spectacular oasis.  This picture was taken on Lord Howe Island where a single tree can extend over two hectares with many trunks formed from aerial roots.