Melbourne bot. Garden
26/6/64
Your Excellency.
By this months mail steamer I forward for your Excellency's kind acceptance a collection of 98 species of seeds of ornamental extra-Australian plants, anticipating that though the native vegetation of Western Australia affords so many elements for garden-ornamentation, these foreign plants will nevertheless gladly be accepted around your dwellings.
May I beg of your Excellency to afford me such aid as may be within your power to elucidate phytographically the species of Xanthorroea1 of your Colony, since these curious plants are hitherto very imperfectly known & the material in my Museum from the collections of Preiss & others is unsufficient to settle their specific limits I have assigned diagnoses to two new South Australian species recently in the fourth volume of my Fragmenta,2 a work in which I named and defined a not inconsiderable number of plants of W. Austr. To offer such diagnoses as will stand the field-test also of Xanthorrhoea, it would be needful to have of the various species a bunch of leaves, a flower stem, a flower-spike, and a ripe fruit-spike; and to prevent insects destroying them it would be needful to dry the spikes with artificial heat rapidly & to sprinkle them afterwards with oleum terebinth or petroleum.
Such specimina would have additional value if accompanied by notes on the verious absolute lengths and proportional lengths of the leaves, the spikes, stems, the fragility or density of the foliage, the range of the species over your country, its utility &c
Had I few pounds weight of each of your poison-plants, accompanied by such specimina as would enable me to recognize with precision the respective species, I would glady experiment on them here, as apparently the effect of the deleterious Leguminosae of W. Australia has never been closely investigated with a view of giving these plants their correct place in toxicology.3 Would it not be possible to destroy these plants by methodical & periodical burning, and by disseminating over their area such grasses as Cynodon Dactylon and other spreading plants content with a meagre soil? The British Hordeum murinum has taken extensively possession of the desert-country on the Murray-River & affords now a vast amount of forage there to the flocks. There are several plants in this colony also, as well introduced as indigenous, which might I think be called advantageously into aid to subdue the vegetable enemies of your herds & flocks, and if in the endeavour of extirpating them I can render any aid, I shall be most happy to do so & trust your Excellency will command my services without hesitation for supplying such seeds as are within my reach for establishing some of those more useful and overpowering plants on your pastures & vasts.
I remain with deep obedience
your
Ferd. Mueller, MD, PhD, FRS.
His Excellency
the Governor of West Australia.
Cynodon
Dactylon
Hordeum murinum
Leguminosae
Xanthorrhoea
Xanthorroea
Please cite as “FVM-64-06-26,” in Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, edited by R.W. Home, Thomas A. Darragh, A.M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D.M. Sinkora†, J.H. Voigt† and Monika Wells accessed on