Botanist Fancies Fems

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31588, 27 January 1968, Page 2

Botanist Fancies Fems

Much Australian flora, particularly in the Northern Territory, was little known, said Dr Mary Tindale, a Sydney botanist who is in Christchurch for the science congress.

This made the Northern Territory very attractive to the botanist interested in classifying new plant species. Dr Tindale said. Dr Tindale is an authority on fems and wattles, but she is interested in all plants. She will present a paper at the congress on the differences between the fern floras of New Zealand and Aus-

tralia. Ferns in New Zealand dominated the landscape, said Dr Tindale, but Australia had a larger variety of species—about 250, compared with New Zealand’s 167. Wattles were a dominant part of the flora of Australia, and peppered the landscape from the coastline to the dead heart, she said. The genus —Acacia —included about 650 species, some of which she had discovered. The discovery of a new species was very exciting, but no decision could be made before a thorough search of literature dating back to the mid-eighteenth century to ensure that the species had not been previously described. Wattles had no commercial uses in Australia but in South Africa wattle bark was used for tanning leather. Dr Tindale is secretary of the Systematic Botany Committee and works for the New South Wales Department of Agriculture, which deals with horticultural queries from many States and from overseas. Dr Tindale is making a special study of the tropical legumes which grow on the coast of New South Wales. Dr Tindale said many botanists preferred to specialise in plant diseases but she liked the more academic side of botany, which was concerned with classification. She has concentrated on ferns since she took her honours degree. She spent two and a half years as Australian liaison officer at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, and is now on the international committee for the botanical nomenclature of the Pteridophyta (ferns).