About

Nursery labels give a range and leave it there. "3 to 5 m" covers a shrub you can see over and a tree you cannot, and it says nothing about which one you will get in your soil, with your rainfall. This site collects what people actually measured.

What is here

2,436 species and subspecies across 13 genera of Australian natives, and for each one, however many real plants growers have recorded: height and width in metres, the month it was planted, and the conditions it grew in. Soil, pH, annual rainfall, coastal or inland, and the postcode.

The conditions are the point. A jarrah in Albany and a jarrah in Kalgoorlie are the same species and nothing like the same plant. One measurement tells you how big that plant was at that age. A few dozen across different soils and rainfall tell you what the species does, which is the thing a label cannot.

Where the numbers come from

Gardeners, growers and anyone else who went outside with a tape measure. Not from nursery catalogues, not from field guides, and not from me guessing. Estimates are welcome as long as they are honest ones, and contributors can add a note explaining anything unusual: pruned hard, coastal wind, irrigated, browsed by kangaroos.

Plants are measured again over the years, so an entry grows into a record of how fast the plant got there, not just how big it ended up.

Locality, state, average annual rainfall and climate zone are not typed in by the contributor. They are derived from the postcode, using long-term averages for a point inside it. That makes them consistent between entries, and it makes them approximate: a postcode can span a range of hills and flats, and one garden in it may be wetter or drier than the figure shown. Where a contributor knew better and set the rainfall themselves, the plant card says so.

Contributing

There are no accounts. Adding a plant needs a password, which exists only to keep spam out, and you get it by asking for it. When you record a plant you are given a link to it. That link is how you come back in a year or two to add the next measurement.

The taxonomy

Names follow currently accepted botanical usage, which is why the dryandras appear here as Banksia. Where a species has named subspecies or varieties they are listed separately, and there is always a "species type" entry for anyone who does not know which one they have. Wild hybrids are left out, but crosses sold in nurseries are listed under one of their parents, written the way the label writes them: Eremophila longifolia x scoparia.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, an entry, a name, a number that cannot be right, email me and I will fix it. Data that nobody checks is not worth much.