By NOEL MURPHY
KIDNEY weed, skullcap, swamp-mat, bladderwort, hound’s-tongue…Enid Mayfield’s latest book reads like a witch’s shopping list.
Many of the species would probably go very neatly into a hag’s cauldron but that’s not really what Ms Mayfield’s catalogue, Flora of the Otway Plain & Ranges 2, is all about.
For starters, it’s full of sophisticated illustrations and pithy descriptions of almost 500 daisies, heaths, peas, saltbushes, sundews, wattles and other plants.
It’s a botanical cornucopia, replete with intricate penned and coloured images.
The book is also a field guide to shrubs, trees, herbs, climbers and vines inhabiting the forests and open spaces, the dry and damp places, of far-flung parts southwest of Geelong.
Officially, it’s a collection of 480 shrubby and herbaceous dicotyledons as the second volume in a project Ms Mayfield has been working on as an illustrator/researcher at Geelong Botanic Gardens .
“I’ve covered from the Bellarine Peninsula to Portland, basically,” Ms Mayfield said.
“All the species were collected in the field apart from a handful we couldn’t find that we got from herbariums.”
The book covers a diverse range of flora from a region that boasts temperate rainforests, mountain ash forest, heathlands, plains and coastal dunes.
