10 Dec, 1918.] Native Fibre Plants. 747 



NATIVE FIBRE PLANTS. 



By Alfred J. Ewart, B.Sc, Ph.D., Government Botanist. 



As the tenii " fibre plant " has been used in a misleading sense,* it 

 may be as well to define it more exactly. Fibres are as much an essential 

 part of the stiiicture of a flowering plant as bones are of a vertebrate 

 animal, so that a list of the fibre plants of Victoria would be merely 

 a list of the flowering plants of Victoria, and would include the ferns and 

 their allies also. The term can, however, be restricted so as to include 

 only those plants whose fibres have been proved to have a definite com- 

 mercial value as sources of fibre. From this point of view bo plants 

 native to Victoria have become recognised fibre plants. A number of 

 the more promising were tested by Mr. Guilfoyle and others many years 

 ago and the fibres extracted, but none of them has been able to displace 

 any of the recognised sources of fibres. To be able to do this, a new fibre 

 plant must satisfy various conditions, which may be detailed as follows : — 



1. Its fibres must be easily capable of separation and purification. 



2. They must be equal or superior in strength, length, and quality to 



the class of fibre with which they have to compete. 



3. They must be present either in unlimited quantity, or must come 



froim plants which are capable of cultivation. 



The exploitation of a fibre plant means a factory, and a factory can- 

 not be dependent upon a precarious or quickly exhausted supply of a 

 wild plant. If the fibre of the latter is sufficiently valuable commercially, 

 the plant is worth cultivating to secure a constant supply, and it must 

 then compete with easily cultivable plants, such as flax, &c. Further, in a 

 •country where thousands of tons of straw are burnt annually, not out of 

 wastefulness, but because the price obtainable for the whole yield would 

 not cover the cost of collection and transportation, there is no need to 

 search among wild plants for materials for strawboard or coarse papei* 

 pulp. 



The plant fibres of use comimercially fall into three main classes. 

 There are, firstly, the fibres termed " pappus," Avhich are hairs growing 

 usually from seeds enclosed in pods (cotton, kapok, &c.). ]^o native 

 plant shows any likelihood of being able to displace any of the plants 

 recognised as sources of this type of fibre. The combination of strength, 

 length, and purity in the cotton fibre is unique among plants. 



In the second class of fibre plants, the fibres belong to what is termed 

 sclerenchyma tissue, and in Dicotyledons they occur just outside the 

 vascular bundles (veins) in a herb, or in the bark outside ihe wood in a 

 tree. In Monocotyledons, however, the fibres are usually associated 

 with the vascular bundles which are scattered all through the stem 

 or leaf, and do not occur on the outside of the stem only. As 

 a general rule, therefore, in Dicotyledons this class of fibre 

 is more easily obtained in pure form than in Monocotyledons, 

 where it is associated with the wood tissue and soft, weak, easily 

 decomposed phloem tissue of the vascular bundle. The finer fibres of 



• Journal of Agriculture, October, 1918, p. 600, " Indigenous Fibrous Plants of Victoria." 



