I've heard that Grevillea rosmarinifolia came through, where all other Grevilleas were lost. And some Acacias, but didn't catch which ones. This was at Neil Marriot's garden near the Grampians, and I heard him speaking on the AC's garden show Saturday morning.

The callitris growing around Stanthorpe certainly burn very well - certainly enough to set adjoining plants alight.

Thanks. Interesting to see yet another way in which tough old G rosmarinifolia is good value!
I'm particularly interested in the comment about the Callitris. The opposite view seemed counter-intuitive, but these sorts of things are worth querying!
I would love to hear whether ony of the other claims for fire-retardance in plants are substantiated (or otherwise) by experience!
Trish

The Acacias mentioned by Neil included Acacia meansii (Black Wattle), and Acacia melanoxylon (Blackwood). However, most wattles have fire retardant qualities. It is likely that your local wattles will be suitable.

The fire retardant quality of wattles has been known for many years. Suggest that you see what your state forestry department recommends.

Trish
This topic is dear to my heart partly because I too know that "natives ain't natives". DNR some time back put out a fact sheet on fire retardant plants. The F.S. explained the difference between fire retardant and fire resistant, discussed uses as a spark barrier and listed a number of retardant spp, mostly native but including some common exotics. The whole thrust was in careful species selection to help protect property while understanding that these plants probably wouldnâÂÂt survive a wildfire event. They would then have to be replaced. I havenâÂÂt got a FS here but can get hold of one if youâÂÂd like a copy.

I like the idea of planting retardant spp (trees and understory) along a swale/s upwind of property; also perhaps as an interface between house and bushland.

ItâÂÂs probably well known (excuse me!) that many (fire resistant) spp. e.g. most eucs do burn well and can disseminate sparks and glowing leaves, twigs and bark. Also their litter will burn fiercely whereas litter from retardant spp. I believe burns slowly/ not at all depending too on moisture content. However, typically the burnt fire-resistant spp recovers, if necessary from lignotubers, seeds etc, and regrows.

I think the ideal body to disseminate this kind of information would be the rural fire brigades. Just called my local office, the staff member is going to have a look for any publication on the topic. She said there used to be a good one but thinks it hasnâÂÂt been reprinted/ updated. Brigades often have trouble recruiting volunteers...not everyone can/ wants to be a firie, or an executive officer, or do catering....here's another job, relatively undemanding at that. Production of a regular newsletter and planting schemes an ideal topic.

We also agreed that good information on labels could provide nurseries with a marketing tool. This person has heard that local nurseries have enquiries from people moving to acreage about just this topic.

Thankfully haven't had personal experience of house/ garden wildfires in cQ but do have rules at the acreage about eucs etc. None close to the house and none on the side of the prevailing wind. Dry rain forest species have been used in a long row to the east and ideally these would be given a supplementary watering every 2-4 weeks depending on need and the dam level. Nature up here commonly grows dry rainforest species among rocks where the inflammable fuel load from grass is low. Rocks make a good mulch, from the point of view of the plant!

Cheers
Rose

Thanks Rose,
I am curious to know where you live? There don't seem to be many people taking an interest in dry rainforest / softwood scrub plants, and they seem to me to have such huge potential for gardens.
I do have a copy of the old DNT factsheet an fire-retardant plants. It doesn't seem to be available on the internet, more's the pity. The internet is a bit unsatisfying on the subject - I had hoped to find a lot more since I first researched the subject four or five years ago. A lot of internet links on the subject led to dead ends. I wonder whether people are hesitating to recommend "fire retardant" plants for fear of litigation? Perhaps we should call them "less flammable", so that people really can plant sensibly, without blamking their sources of information for failing to provide a magic shield!
There are some useful links:

Jackie French has a good discussion of fire retardance generally, though few natives are mentioned by name, at
http://www.abc.net.au/canberra/stories/s778007.htm

su.edu.au/ASGAP/fire.html has the best list I could find.

The site http://www.global-garden.com.au/burnley/feb00dte.htm has a short list.

P/APOL15/sep99-14.html#ignite has an interesting discussion of a trial of the ignitability of leaves of some natives, and gives us the names of a few good ones. It is particularly interesting with the suggestion that the mineral content of the leaves was more relevant to fire retardance that water content, which gives hope to those of us who just can't manage to water their plants, when drought and fires come together.

The trouble is that there are a lot of sites that I have difficulty in trusting. I found a fact sheet  a copy of a glossy government publication - at
http://www.actpla.act.gov.au/publications/firewise/gardens.pdf but it was disappointing. More introduced than local plants, and included Koelreuteria which is an environmental weed in Toowoomba. (Not "declared", so the council is still planting them, but they behave like an environmental weed  the privet of the future. The list of 7 suggested native trees included four Eucalypts, which does not give me confidence in the pamphlet as a whole.

IÂd be interested to hear of other sites. There is still a lot of research, obviously, needing to be done on the subject, which is why I am interested to hear of ordinary gardeners personal stories about fires. We might develop a body of anecdotal knowledge which, sometime, might be researched scientifically by somebody. My eventual hope is that the research would be comprehensive enough for us all to have access to the names of our local native fire retardant species.
Cheers, Trish

Trish
Hope to have more to say soon; meanwhile, to answer your question, I live in Mackay, have had 30 acres north of Rockhampton since '78 and was reared on the Connors Range between the two. There were nasty fires to the south east of the acreage several years ago and every visit I feel I'm assessing vunerability from that direction.

The topic hasn't come up at meetings of either local SGAP group.

Re the removal of the fact sheet, I was wondering, too, whether it was on legal advice.

Greening Australia another organisation which could take an interest.

I'm also interested in inflammability of exotic grasses; some burn hotter/ cooler than others. I shudder when I see the body of molasses grass downhill from a friend at Mudgeeraba.

Rose, wondering what happened to my contractions :)

My friend said a lot of smooth trunked eucalypts are still standing in her area after the vic fires. Wish I could grow grevillea rosmarinifolia , but the kangaroos eat them down to nothing. We had a fire lit by a fire bug around midnight a week ago after a very hot day, with fierce winds blowing through the valley. Luckily I was still up and noticed the huge orange glow above the forest and rang it in - it was a kilometre away, very scary. I've been researching fire retardant plants and tearing my hair out, the lists are so contradictory, especially now that I've found the Tasmanian government site. They reckon many of the plants listed as fire retardants are in fact highly flammable eg acmena smithii (lilypilly), casuarina cunninghamiana (river sheoak), elaeocarpus reticulatus (blueberry ash) corymbia maculata (spotted gum). But I've spoken to someone who said fire swept through a friend's vineyard and was stopped by a line of lillypillies. Also I tried burning fresh lillypilly leaves on a big bonfire one year and they didn't want to burn.

Surely there's a reliable list out there somewhere done by someone who knows their stuff? For now IÂm going by the ACT government list (type in Âfirewise home gardensÂ) and the Country Fire Service of South Australia list, in the hope that after their bush fires, theyÂll have done some decent research. If anyoneÂs interested, I have compiled a list of most commonly mentioned fire retardant plants, with a code indicating who recommends them, whether the Tassies reckon they are flammable, and whether they are weeds  an amazing number of them are! Do you want me to post it?

These are the other results I got testing plants on my bonfire. Acacia iteaphylla (flinders range wattle which many lists say is fire retardant) burnt pretty easily. Acacia vestita and acacia elata (cedar wattle) were slow to burn. Acacia floribunda and a. cognata both flared up very quickly. The needles of casuarina cunninghamiana flared into flame quite quickly but immediately died, and the wood didnÂt seem inclined to burn. Eucalyptus leucoxylon took quite a while to catch, then just kind of melted  however it often has quite a few dead branches on the tree so this could be a fire hazard. Corymbia/euc maculata burnt like leucoxylon. Callistemon little john and c. dawson river weeper didnÂt catch quickly, and didn't burn with a whoosh. Hakea laurina (pincushion hakea) didnÂt catch very easily. Leptospermum nanum (red) flared up very quickly. Japanese bamboo was terrifying, it exploded, sounding like gunfire going off all over the valley, although admittedly it was dry, as weÂd cut it down during an evacuation alert.
Does anyone know if rosemary actually is a good fire retardant? I've seen it on quite a few lists; some say only the prostrate form is fire tolerant.

guess the message here is anything will burn in the right situation. the best defence is for at least 100 meters no tall forest trees pines/gums, and any shrubby trees in that safety barrier around the house should be callistemons and the like shrubby trees that will re-sprout, and in the face of a fire, to me that is if there is a fire 40k away start preparing.

first job cut off the top foliage sections of all shrubby trees inside you fire break margin, knock down all tall plants in the garden. amazing how many pic's i saw on tv where homes are completely burnt yet there remains swimming pool or dams full of water near by? rebuild in steel and non-combustable materials.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: lens garden page

Interesting to find my old thread from after the 2006 fires popping up again in 2009. But how sad that there is such a strong reason for the interest.
Kitehawk, it certainly does sound as though you've been having fun playing with matches in your garden!
Somewhere, I have come across some "information" that some kinds of lillypilly (Acmena species) burn easily, but that other lillypillies (Syzygiums) don't. I've no idea how reliable the info is, though. As you say, published information is wildly contradictory. The only steady trend is an increasing dislike, by authorities, of stating that any plants at all are fire-retardant. There's always some idiot who'll stay at home instead of evacuating because of an exaggerated faith in the magical qualities of supposedly fire-retardant plants.
Len is, I'm sure, quite right that anything will burn given the right situation.
However it is still the case that some trees burn more easily than others. Given the choice between a home amongst the gum trees and one amongst rainforest species, you are obviously safer with the latter.
Trish

Hi Trish,

The following web site:
http://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/45318/Vol-8-October-2005.pdf
includes the following statement about a fact sheet:

Bushfire Safety for your Home & Garden:
Landscape Management provides some recommendation on the
use of less flammable vegetation species in landscaping
to reduce bushfire risk. This 2-page fact-sheet is aimed
at helping provide practical information on this oftencouraged
use of fire-retardant plants which as
many of you know formed a major portion of CuongÂs
PhD work.

I have found the fact sheet on the GU website and the link is attached. I gives general guidelines only, as follows:

Plant selection

Different plants burn differently. This is
influenced by a number of features, which
are also influenced by how old the plant is,
the particular environment it is growing in
(including the season) and how it is looked
after (for example, if it is well-watered).
Avoid having plants near your home that may
burn easily. Such plants include those that:
 Accumulate and/or create lots of dry,
dead debris during the fire season;
 Have loose flaky bark;
 Have masses of very fine leaves; and
 Have very low moisture content.

Less flammable plants are those with the following characteristics:
 Produce large, thick leathery leaves;
 Have smooth bark or tightly packed bark
tissue; and
 Retain moisture content.

DonÂt rely on plants being Âfire retardantÂ

While some plants may not burn in low to
moderately intense fires, all plants can burn
in high intensity fires (those fires when you
and your home are most at risk).
You should not rely on published lists of Âfire
retardantÂ, Âfire resistant or Âhard-to-burnÂ
plant species. Some of these plants are also
weeds. You should choose less flammable
plants that have the characteristics outlined
above. It is important to note that the
management of vegetation around your home
is just one part of the fire planning process
for your home. Your local council can provide
information to help you select plants that
are suitable for your local environment.
FaBCon can also help with plants that maybe
suitable in your area.

Regards,
Frank

Here is a link that might be useful: Fact sheet

Hi Frank.
It's nice to see you still look in on this site occasionally. Yes, I was aware of Cuong's work, and it's good, isn't it?
I have relatives at Kinglake, and was interested in their comment that it may not be the species of trees that count, when it comes to fire-resistant gardens, so much as "ordinary gardening practices". They meant things like cleaning up, mowing the lawn, and so on.
However, there are certainly some trees to avoid. I was interested to see that the much-hated introduced eucalypts are known in California as "gasoline trees".
I was looking at the vegetation, all apparently natural regrowth, in a little Brisbane park recently, and wondering how much it reflected the reality of the original environment. Much of Brisbane was once rainforest, and rainforest species grow well in the surrounding gardens. The environmental weeds of the suburb are plants of rainforest type like Koelreuteria and Duranta.
I wonder how many landscapes which are now dominated by eucalypts, were once rainforests or vine scrubs? Eucalypts grow very quickly and easily in cleared, burned and grazed environments, and become enormous and apparently "old" in a mere 50 years.
The romance of building a house in an existing natural environment has undeniable appeal. However I do wonder how many people are building a "home among the gum trees" in the belief that they are living in the "genuine Australian bush" - in situations where gum trees are actually the invaders?
Trish