A native plant never officially recorded in the Warrnambool area has been spotted in what one landcare expert describes as a "perennial remnant of what was hundreds of years ago".
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'Prickfoot' or Eryngium vesiculosum is a spiky, short-rooted plant belonging to the parsley family.
Basalt to Bay Landcare network facilitator Lisette Mills said it was a surprise to find the plant - which is prone to cultivation - on a farm in Warrong.
"This is not a plant you typically find in cultivated or improved pastures so to find it on a farm that's had all of that all around it is special," she said.
"It shows there are still things like this to be found. I found it on a sheep-grazing property which had history in cropping.
"Cropping by its nature disturbs the top layer of the soil frequently and means a lot of plants that are remnants of a time before agriculture came to town are lost.
"Where the sighting of Prickfoot was noted was an area that would have been part of a historical swamp - wet low lying ground in and amongst a rocky barrier just below the surface of the soil.
"In this wetter area the farmer elected to fence it off because the pasture it grows is pretty ordinary and the waterlogged ground is not great for sheep.
"They'd applied for a Moyne Shire Community Carbon Offset Grant to plant 1000 locally native trees and shrubs around the outskirts of the fence, which we were helping to do a few weeks ago with school kids.
"While we were planting I was walking through the edge of the wet area and I came across a patch of this native plant."
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She said while Prickfoot likely existed in the greater region, a database search revealed it had never been recorded in the Warrnambool vicinity.
"When you look at the records of where that plant has been sighted on the VicFlora website, if you drew a line from Port Fairy up the Moyne River then up to Hawkesdale and down through Mortlake to Wangoom, in that space there are no official records for the plant," Ms Mills said.
"It looks like a cos lettuce crossed with a crocodile. Finding it there tells us that part of the farm avoided cropping which meant it survived.
"That's why we encourage farmers to connect with landcare expertise to identify things they think might be weeds to help stop these things from being lost from land they've probably been on for hundreds of thousands of years."
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