Norfolk Island Fascinating Flora

Product Description

Norfolk Island pines are seaside features of places around the world. In contrast, 45 of Norfolk’s plants occur nowhere else and are hardly known even here. The island has some of the world’s rarest plant species, with 47 being listed under Australian law as nationally threatened. In 2003 the entire known populations of eleven species was fewer than fifty plants. Our tiny island paradise has much more than its fair share of significant plants.

Although Norfolk’s native plants are immensely important to the island’s landscape, few people know much about more than a handful. Convict artist John Doody started drawing and painting them in 1791 or 1792, before the plants had names, but few of his illustrations have been published. Famous botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer collected and painted many in 1804, leading to their formal naming. Since then botanists have visited Norfolk from time to time but their work remains inaccessible to the community.

Now, at last, a book on Norfolk’s plants has been published. It will enable readers to learn about all the native species and some of the most important introduced species, which include some of the world’s worst weeds. Every species is illustrated, most by more than 400 photographs but also by paintings by Doody and Bauer, the majority previously unpublished.

The book also contains a chapter on the traditional use of plants on Norfolk, information which is fading from many memories as modern consumer culture displaces the way of life of the settlers from Pitcairn Island.

Another chapter discusses the extraordinary work of the botanists of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, men who risked their lives to discover, collect and name the plants of Norfolk Island and other places. They experienced hardship and terrifying risks which are unimaginable in this modern age — and our plants remain a testament to their scientific devotion.