Talk:Waratah

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The material below was originally in the article. It appears to have been cut & pasted from http://www.aussie-info.com/identity/flora/waratah.php Abstraktn 09:19, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

In 1793 the English botanist, Sir James Smith. Aborigines used the seeds of several species as a source of food. Some species are toxic. The original Waratah is native to a small area of the central coast of New South Wales, and it grows wildly in hilly areas near Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong, and on the slopes of the Great Dividing Range, whilst other species grow in Victoria and Tasmania. Proclaimed the official floral emblem of New South Wales on 24 October 1962. It is a slender, erect shrub, to 3 metres tall and about 1.5 metres across. It has stiff, wedge-shaped and usually coarsely toothed, dark green, leathery leaves to 15 cm long. In cultivation they can grow to about twice the size. The NSW species normally flowers red, but many produce pink or even white flowers. A rare white-flowering form, ‘Wirrimbirra White’, is occasionally available from specialist growers. The large, bright crimson flowerheads consist of many small flowers densely packed into conical or peaked dome-shaped heads to 15 cm across, and surrounded by a collar of large red, smooth bracts. The ‘flower’ is in fact a conflorescence that comprises, depending on the species, as many as 240 individual flowers. It flowers during spring, October to November. It is a bird-attracting plant, providing large quantities of nectar for a variety of honeyeaters.