How To Identify an Australian Native Plant

Australia has over 21,000 native plant species. Getting to know them better can add more personality to the landscape and make you start to bestow fun botany-themed ‘rest stops’ on your co-Explorers.

We acknowledge that this adventure is located on the traditional Country of the palawa people who have occupied and cared for the lands, waters, and their inhabitants for thousands of years. We pay our respects to them as the Traditional Custodians and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.

How to Identify an Australian Native Plant

There are many methods for identifying native Australian plants. When I’m out in the bush, I sometimes photograph the plant in the field and identify it later when I get back to civilisation, so I don’t have to rely on phone reception or add botanical tomes to my pack weight. 

Allow me to run through my method for identifying a native plant species step-by-step using a pretty shrub I spotted on the side of the road while driving up kunanyi / Mount Wellington. Let’s call her Betty.

1. Note the Location and Environment

I took a moment to consider the location and environment that I found Betty in. She was about 50m down Pinnacle Road from The Chalet on kunanyi/Mount Wellington. You can drive all the way to the summit via this road when the weather isn’t dodgy.

The area was wetter compared to the surrounding subalpine vegetation. Betty sat right next to a stream running down a gully, and I couldn’t find others of the same species when I walked up and down the road away from the stream.

She also seemed to be one of the few plant species flowering in the area at the time I was there (winter).

Take a wider-angle shot to note the surrounding flora

2. Photograph Plant Traits

I took photos of the whole plant and different plant parts from different angles. This included branches, stems, and leaves from above and below. Sometimes the lower leaf surface is different to the upper, like in the Alpine coral fern, which has very hairy fronds but only on the underside. I also photographed the flower buds and flowers so I could see both the inside and outside of them.

It’s important to make the photos clear enough to count plant parts and be able to see their shapes, colours, and textures, as this can help you distinguish different species.

Capture the finer details, like the underside of leaves and petals

Read more: An Explorer’s Guide To Hiking With A Camera

3. Use a Botanical Guidebook

One of the best ways to identify a plant species is to find a good guidebook or online plant guide based on the area where you found the plant. A simple online search like ‘alpine plant guide Tasmania’ should do the trick.

The best botanical field guidebook to ID Betty is most likely Wildflowers of Mount Wellington. I don’t have a copy, so I used Exploring the Flora of Cradle Mountain Day Walk Areas instead. Many alpine plant species around wulinantikala / Cradle Mountain can also be found around kunanyi / Mount Wellington. The same principle applies to other Australian landscapes of similar climates, like some coastal environments. The Cushion bush, for example, is dotted across coastal rocks and dunes from Perth to the far eastern end of Victoria, and across the north of Tasmania!

Feel like a legit botanist and keep learning out of reception with a hard-copy guidebook

I flipped through my book for shrubs that looked like Betty, with small leaves and small white flowers. I found four. I was able to rule out three of them using more information in the book and the detailed images I took earlier. Let’s run through them:

1. Alpine heath – This species doesn’t flower in winter and its petals are fused into a tube. But Betty had flowers in winter and her petals were completely separate, or ‘free’
2. Tea trees from genus Leptospermum – Tea tree flowers have only five petals and they don’t flower in winter (around wulinantikala / Cradle Mountain, at least). But Betty’s flowers had six petals each and were found in winter
3. Daisy bushes from genus Olearia – Daisy bushes only flower in summer in the wulinantikala / Cradle Mountain area. Additionally, daisy ‘flowers’ have a completely different structure from Betty’s flowers, because daisy ‘flowers’ or ‘floral heads’ are actually made up of many tiny true flowers

The fourth possibility was bauera (Bauera rubioides). According to the book, bauera plants like damp gullies, and flowers can be found year-round, including winter, even though it mostly flowers in spring and summer. The flowers are hanging, or ‘pendulous’ (Betty’s flowers did hang down or sideways). Leaves are in groups, or ‘whorls’ of two, but they look like they’re actually in groups of six because each leaf is made up of three long ‘leaflets’.

We’re getting closer and closer to revealing the identity of Betty

Betty seemed pretty likely to be Bauera rubioides at this point. Everything the book said about bauera was consistent with her traits and her preferred environment. I also read descriptions on Bauera rubioides in a few more guides, Key to Tasmanian Vascular Plants and Alpine Wildflowers of Tasmania. Their descriptions were also consistent with Betty.

However, there was a small chance of having missed other species that Betty could be, especially because I used a plant guide for a different alpine region from where she was found. Some guidebooks generally contain only the most common species found in an area, so relying on guides for nearby areas won’t always work. Some alpine plants don’t occur across all mountains, like the deciduous beech, which doesn’t naturally occur on kunanyi / Mount Wellington. If I used a guide to ID a deciduous beech in spring or summer that didn’t have info on deciduous beech trees, I might have misidentified it as a similar species like the myrtle beech.

I sometimes get around this problem by looking at other possible species in a few more resources including additional guidebooks and online guides, and asking for help from other botanists.

4. Ask for Help! Use iNaturalist

There are many naturalists (professionals and hobbyists, amateurs and experts) who can help you identify a plant. One place they congregate is iNaturalist. This is a website where you can share observations of any life form, for fun or research.

Sometimes I use it to help me learn new species by using the website’s AI and other naturalists’ know-how. If you’re lucky enough to have phone reception while you’re in the field, you can use their AI for plant ID using a smartphone app called Seek.

To enter Betty as an observation on my iNaturalist account, I hit the upload button at the top of the site page, uploaded a few photos so the flowers and leaves could be clearly seen, and entered the time and location at which I found her. For the location, you can type in coordinates but in this case the website’s mapping system recognised The Chalet as a landmark. It automatically set the plant’s geographic location as occurring within about 195m of The Chalet. I didn’t change this because I found Betty about 50m down the road from The Chalet.

You can enter in specific coordinates or use iNaturalist’s mapping system

After providing photos and a time and location, I clicked the box saying, ‘Species name’. Then the website’s AI suggested its own identification. It can provide multiple suggestions, but this time it came up with only one, Baeura rubioides, the same species deduced using the flora guidebook earlier!

The AI was pretty certain about this one

I accepted the website’s suggestion as Baeura rubioides and submitted the observation, resulting in the following observation page.

Submit your observations and others can help verify your findings

A few hours later, a fellow user on iNaturalist suggested the same ID. I also checked iNaturalist to see if there were other species in the genus Bauera that Betty could be instead. But there were only three other species and none of them occurred in Tasmania. By now I was pretty confident that Bauera rubioides was the right species!

Introducing Betty the Bauera rubioides!

Final Tips

Some distinguishing traits like ‘leaflets arranged in groups of six’ might make you think ‘How was I supposed to know that?’. That’s one reason why guidebooks and online guides are helpful as they tell you what characteristics to pay attention to.

The more you ID different plants, the more you’ll notice these details, and add them to your arsenal of things to pay attention to. Gradually it’ll become easier to figure out how to distinguish them and you’ll be a botany wizard in no time. Sometimes plants with weird traits will throw you off, but that’s the beauty of it!

I hope the steps here will give you somewhere to start if you’re new to identifying native Australian plants!

Lastly, here’s a cute spider that was doing its thing on the bauera. Over to you, arachnologists!

Can you identify this spider?