Flowers Of The South Coast and Ranges Of New South Wales
Gardening Botany Australian Flora Horticulture Field Guide Native Plants Nature Reference Ecology
If you’re hunting for a field guide that turns every coastal or Blue Mountains bushwalk into a botanical treasure hunt, this scarce 1999 soft-cover edition of “Flowers of the South Coast and Ranges of New South Wales” by Don & Betty Wood is the book serious gardeners, ecology students and weekend naturalists keep in their day-pack. Covering the strip from Sydney’s Royal National Park down through the Shoalhaven, Eurobodalla and into East Gippsland, the authors have photographed and hand-listed more than 600 of the region’s most showy and ecologically significant native blooms—everything from flannel flowers and rock orchids to the rarely pictured turquoise milkwort—arranged in colour-coded chapters so you can put a name to a plant in seconds.
What makes this copy special is its balance of portability and detail: each species plate faces a concise panel giving flowering months, preferred soil, altitude range and whether the plant has garden value for coastal landscaping or fire-resistant revegetation. Because the Woods worked as field naturalists rather than academics, the notes read like advice from a knowledgeable friend—telling you which daisy bushes actually tolerate lime, which correas will bring birds to a balcony pot, and how to distinguish the invasive introduced oxalis from the dainty native shamrock pea. For anyone restoring a coastal dune or designing a water-wise cottage garden south of the divide, this is the quick-reference bible that nurseries no longer stock.
The 1999 print-run was modest and most copies were carried into the field, so clean, tight copies are now scarce in the second-hand market. This particular paperback is wonderfully intact: pages are crisp, unmarked and free of the foxing that plagues coastal storage, while the illustrated covers show only the honest light sun-fade you’d expect from a book that has lived in a glove-box rather than on a shelf. It is not inscribed or signed, making it an ideal gift copy or working reference you can annotate yourself.
Whether you’re a TAFE horticulture student compiling a herbarium, a landscape architect sourcing indigenous species for a Batemans Bay project, or a traveller who refuses to leave “that pretty purple thing” unnamed, this user-friendly guide delivers authoritative information without the academic weight. Snap it up now—when the current coastal development boom finishes, many of these wild populations will be harder to find in the field, and the book will be even harder to find anywhere.
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