THE WEEDS OF NEW SOUTH WALES. 17 



These works will be referred to in the following pages under the names 

 Black, Ewart, Bailey. 



See also "A Manual of Weeds" by Ada E. Georgia (The Macmillan Co., 

 New York). It deals with the weeds of the United States and Canada, and 

 is of interest and value to us because a number of the weeds have found their 

 way to Australia, and others may be expected to follow. 



(a) Annuals and Perennials. 



Some few years ago, the Engineer of the Patrick Plains Shire made the 

 thoughtful suggestion that, for the purpose of administration, weeds should 

 be divided into annuals and perennials. It was pointed out that, according 

 to law, when weeds are first observed on an area, a notice must be served. 

 Three months must elapse before any further action can be taken, and by 

 that time most of the annual weeds have seeded, and it is practically useless 

 to do anything to them. 



Annuals usually flower early in the spring and should be properly de- 

 stroyed before the seed ripens. They are also more readily destroyed than 

 perennials. Perennials, of course, should be destroyed before the seeds ripen, 

 but they are frequently more difficult to destroy, and often flower later in 

 the season. In New South Wales it is not always possible to draw a sharp 

 line between annuals and perennials, because some weeds and grasses which 

 are annuals in Europe live through the winter here, but it would be well 

 to classify all such doubtful weeds as annuals. 



Annuals often make up for their short' life by the large number of seeds 

 that they produce. Perennials have the faculty most developed of repro- 

 ducing themselves vegetatively, that is, by shoots in contradistinction to by 

 seeds, and thus a plant may produce dense masses of growth without pro- 

 ducing a single seed. 



(fr) Native Plants as Weeds. 



Sometimes a native plant invades a man's cultivation paddock or orchard 

 and becomes a weed, but the number of such complained of is vastly fewer 

 than exotics. I have drawn attention to the subject in the Agricultural 

 Gazette for 1913, p. 911, for example, in referring to Olearia viscidula, a 

 native daisy with sticky foliage which sometimes goes under the absurd name 

 of Wild Verbena." 



Some men are not liable to skin irritation ; in most cases it is more or less 

 of an idiosyncrasy. Incidentally Humea elegans, an ornamental sweet- 

 scented plant, erroneously called " Wild Tobacco," may cause irritation. 

 See the Agricultural Gazette for 1914, p. 236. 



(c) Places that harbour Weeds. 



(1) Neglected Cemeteries. Two of the places that a botanist arriving at 

 a township visits if he can are the railway line and the cemetery. The latter 

 is, like the line, fenced more or less securely, and it is often a place in which 

 the weeds of a district grow unchecked. We have many virtues, but keeping 

 our cemeteries tidy and free from weeds is not one of them. This cannot 

 be left to the individual owners of graves, who are often migratory. 



(2) Roadsides an Alsatia) for Weeds. Roads being the land over which 

 animals of all descriptions pass, many of them laden with merchandise, it is 



