Well, our plants produce huge amounts of turions - in fact we have to
rescue them out of the peat-bog moat because when it rains they get
splashed up onto the wooden retaining walls or over the edge of the bog!
Each turion forms (ideally) one plant and each plant forms a few to
several turions, so this plant reproduces (vegetatively) faster than a
P. primuliflora or D. adelae! This is just as well, as the site where
we found our plants was a definitely not a permanent pool of water - a
year or so ago, it had dried up and I don't know if the plants survived
(I haven't been there recently). The other point about U. australis is
although it is an easy plant to grow, it seems a little sensitive to
water conditions. They grow extremely well out-doors in the peat bog,
but won't grow in our fish-pond (either the fish eat them, or the algae
smothers them) or in the greenhouse water-trays (don't know why, maybe
the water gets too warm? I'll try again).
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| John Taylor [The Banshee] | Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology |
| rphjt@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au | Department of Applied Physics |
| MOKING IS A HEALTH HAZARD. | Melbourne, Victoria, AUSTRALIA |
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