Helping our Blue Devils
Posted on 6 February, 2014 by Connecting Country
The Connecting Country Work Crew recently came across a few patches of Blue Devil (Eryngium ovinum) during their field assessments. This hardy herb grows mostly in grassland and grassy woodland communities and can be found in most Australian states and territories.
Blue Devil (Eryngium ovinum) photographed at Barkers Creek
The prickly plant is a rosette-forming perennial which grows from late winter, flowering in summer and then dies down around autumn, after seeding . It has a fleshy tap-root that stores energy while dormant. These plants belong to the same plant family as Carrots and Fennel, but please don’t eat them!
Three members of the works crew with a Blue Devil.
Blue Devils are now uncommon in our region. The crew has only found them in a small number of grassy woodlands and de-stocked paddocks. Jarrod and the rest of the team would love to know about Blue Devil populations or other rare or unusual animal and plant species on your property. Through the Connecting Landscapes project, we may be able to improve their habitats by building protective fences or undertaking pest and weed control.
You can find out more about the Connecting Landscapes project here.
6.5 ks north of glenlyon – Have blue devils growing in a barren area on a hillside has not been grazed for 15 years except for kangaroos they seem to come up every year I have grown them from seed-they are a great cut flower and hold their colour for a long time
we have blue devil growing on our small property at Wangaratta. I don,t know if neighbours have them as well, we have noticed them the past few years- thought they were a weed!
There are quite a lot of these in Mickleham, Vic. They are very unusual!
Hi Malcom, thanks for some great information, and very interesting ideas. It is such a shame that Blue Devils have become so depleted within the landscape. Hopefully with people keeping an eye out for them (and possibly collecting some seeds to propagate) we will be able to increase our knowledge of them further within the Mt Alexander Shire, and preserve these remnant populations.
Hi Christine, its great to hear that you have some Blue Devils on your property, and with the various daisies it sounds like a beautiful place! Blue Devils don’t always come up each year but their fleshy taproot allows them to survive until conditions improve, much like some orchids and Lilies. Thanks for your interest.
I live in Derrinal, basalt , I have, every year, a few blue devils outside the farm gate, small white daisies, one bush of large daisies, amongst native grasses. Not increasing. Sometimes I see the odd blue devil in the paddock but not in the same spot. Christine
A very interesting post on Blue Devils. A really attractive plant with its blue, sometimes purplish flower heads but a plant that has often seemed to lack friends, assumedly largely because of its prickly nature. For example, it can be very tough on the paws of sheepdogs! Its reputation wasn’t helped by being incorrectly described in one widely used weed id book as an exotic from South Africa!
As a child, we had whole, large paddocks of it, mostly on Basalt plains country on the family farm at Cape Clear, South-West of Ballarat. Our experience there has been its near total disappearance once paddocks are cultivated and fertilised. It appears to have declined very significantly in that area with the big swing from extensive grazing to improved pastures and the more recent and even bigger move to both more area used for cereal cropping and more intensive cropping. Our experience on the family farm would suggest (not hard evidence) that it’s the cultivation rather than the fertiliser that really knocks it around. Blue Devil remains quite plentiful on better quality roadsides in the Cape Clear area.
It sounds from the original post that Blue Devil has been reduced to mainly small remnants in Mt. Alexander Shire. If some active restoration as well as protection is to take place, perhaps it’s worth considering the advice given by Prof. Ari Hoffman at one of the 2012 series of Connecting Country education workshops (Sutton Grange, 8 May 2012). At that workshop he explained that many smaller, isolated populations (he used mainly alpine grasses for illustration) have the risk of having a narrow genetic base. He advocated increasing planting/seeding rates, continuing to collect most seed locally but sourcing some seed from intermediate distances and some from far populations. From memory his quick recipe was proportions of 70:20:10. Is this worth a try with Mt. Alexander Shire’s Blue Devils? Radical advice for those of us who’ve focussed on ‘local provenance’ but perhaps worth a try.