Images of Canberra - the curse in bloom

There’s fields and fields of it out past Dunlop and Macgregor. Very perdy.

My grandmother always told stories that back in her day, they used to sell it as a flower in Sydney known as “Riverina Bluebelle”.

‘Salvation Jane’ was a SA name as I recall it and that’s the direction it came from.

Sometime in the late sixties it arrived in large proportions in the Riverina. Every man & his dog tooled around on their tractor with the boom sprays going trying to wipe it out (the boom sprays were left over from 4 or 5 years earlier when we’d tried, without no luck at all, to wipe out the ‘Cape Weed’. The Cape weed was much more hated because it got in the wheat crops.

I’ve never seen stock of any type eat it! If it was the ‘salvation’ in the legend the stock in SA must have been very hard up.

Awful stuff. It’s also in the less travelled area between Majura and Ainslie, though not in such numbers. I guess the volunteers are keeping it cleared out of the popular areas.

switch said :

Don’t you mean “Salvation Jane?” 🙂

Aren’t we in sheep country? If so doesn’t that mean it’s Salvation Jane cos it is digestible for complex ruminants like sheep and cattle? It’s only poisonous to things like horses (yes, yes and all the other mammals with only one gut 🙂 )

Nice shot! Perhaps a name change to “Artistic Bastard” is in order.

capeweed

Carmody’s Curse! If we’re not consistent it’ll never catch on!

I can’t believe Patersons Curse has been allowed to get out of control like this. Its nothing new, I know, but its definitely a ‘curse’ that doesn’t get better by itself.

Ditto “monster of the deep” after chipping acres of the stuff by hand, it doesn’t look so pretty any more.

Many thanks 🙂

It may be an unpleasant weed but it sure takes a purdy picture.