On the fourth Saturday of every month, I take myself off to my little patch of bush (think a little patch of wooded slope with a creek at the bottom) with my fellow volunteers and we try to remove all the weeds that are spreading through our little patch, so that the native vegetation here can thrive.

While I was doing my thing, I took a few photos of some of the native plants I came across.

First up, is a photo of the fruit of the bleeding heart tree, or Homalanthus populifolius. This is a native tree that gets its common name from the fact that leaves turn bright red before they drop-these stand out against the green leaves and look really pretty.

These pretty blue flowers come from another Australian native called Comelina cyanea, which is a ground cover. Some people don’t like it but I think it’s really pretty.

These leaves are from what I think is a small Acacia decurrens. I love all acacia’s, especially when they are in flower-the bright yellow flowers have a unique smell that I really enjoy.

The next plant is a fern called Pteris cretica, or cretin broke. I like the Pteris genus of ferns. I think that a lot of this is because they look different to many other ferns that I come across on a daily basis.

Another little ground cover, called basket grass, or Oplismenus aemulus. I like this little grass due to the the interesting leaves.

It was good to see my lovely patch of Australian bush looking so green, on my last visit in November it was a lot drier and a lot less lush!

As always, there is still plenty of work to be doing and not enough of either time or volunteers to make more progress. Provided we keep turning up and plodding on, we will continue to improve things slowly!