THE WEEDS OF NEW SOUTH WALES. 129 



Cape Weed (Cryptostemma calendula: eum R.Br.). 

 (COMPOSITE: Daisy Family.) 



Popular Description. A spreading herb with a rosette of leaves deeply 

 "cut," and hoary on the underside. Flowers, yellow, daisy-like. Seeds 

 enveloped in a woolly covering. 



Botanical Description. 



A prostrate herb with rosolate leaves, sinuate lyrate or pinnatifid, scabrous 

 above, hoary beneath. Flower-head solitary on a scape-like peduncle, radiate, 

 yellow. Achenes thickly clothed with long soft hairs. 



Experience in other States. This is a very old introduction to Australia. 

 It is a native of South Africa, and probably came to Western Australia first. 

 At all events it seems to have first got a good hold there. In Huegel's 

 Enumeratio Plantarum, p. 67 (1837), it is recorded from King George's 

 Sound from collections made in 1833. In Mueller's Report as Victorian 

 Government Botanist, dated 14th September, 1868 (printed in Journal of 

 Botany, vii, 183), he notes that Baron von Huegel noticed and recorded it in 

 1833, " as a exterminable weed of Australia." In Lehmann's Plantce 

 Preissiance, i, 487, it is recorded as having been collected at Fremantle in 

 1839. 



The late Dr. Schomburgk, Director of the Botanic Gardens, Adelaide, 

 wrote of it in one of his Annual Reports (1875) : 



Cape Dandelion. A native of the Cape. It was in the year 1850 that I first 

 noticed a few isolated plants on the side of the road leading through the Gawler 

 Plains. The following year a few made their appearance on the banks of the 

 Gawler River. From year to year it is rapidly taking possession of pastures, 

 as well as cultivated land, and is now found quite 200 miles towards the north 

 from its starting point, covering even the untimbered mountain ranges to their 

 summits. When in bloom the country presents a peculiar appearance, and as 

 far as the eyes reach a yellow carpet only is seen. It is an annual, and although 

 doing much harm to the more tender indigenous herbage, it is much liked by 

 cattle and sheep, which eat it eagerly, preferring it even in a dry state to 

 wheaten hay and licking the large and very abundant seed from the ground. 

 When in bloom many people consider it injurious to the lungs from the 

 inhalation of the pollen by which the air is impregnated. This circumstance 

 may also be attributed to the moist atmosphere prevailing when the dandelion 

 is in flower. Though the plant has taken possession of the land for the last 

 twenty-five years it grows as vigorously as ever, and it seems that over- 

 stimulation fails to bring about degeneracy and subsequent extinction. 



Now we come to Victoria. It seems to have got a hold in that State 

 almost as soon as in South Australia. Thirty-nine years ago in the suburbs 

 of Melbourne I saw large grazing paddocks with the plants all over as thick 

 as they could stick, as the phrase goes. So abundant was it over half a 

 century ago that a proposal was made to utilize the cotton on the seeds for 

 commercial purposes. 



See a paper " Remarks on a filamentous material grown upon the plant 

 Cryptostemma calendulaceum, believed to be suitable for manufacturing 

 purposes," by Henry H. Hayter. (Trans. R. S. Vic., vi, 26). (Read llth 

 November, 1861.) 



He speaks of it as exceedingly common around Melbourne, and of its 

 " gradually working its way into the interior, where it is much disliked as it 

 forms only indifferent pasture for animals, and when it dies away, as it does 

 during the summer months, it leaves the country quite bare, and almost as 

 black as if it had been passed over by a bush fire." 



