Journal of the Australian Native Plants Society Canberra region (Inc)
Book Review: Orchids of the Southern Tablelands of NSW including the ACT
By Ian Fraser
Mar, 2025
Authors: Tobias Hayashi and Jean Egan; with Roger Farrow and Tony Wood
Published by the authors. 288 pages. 2nd edn RRP $50
Review by Ian Fraser
I had the pleasure of attending the launch of the first edition of this very fine field guide at the National Botanic Gardens and I was surprised to learn of a new edition already. I should have realised that that seemingly recent event was nearly four and a half years ago now, but that first edition obviously did well, as it certainly deserved to.
The authors are all highly qualified for the task. Tony was a local expert and excellent photographer who introduced many Canberrans to our wealth of local orchids but sadly died before the first edition appeared. His loss is still felt by many of us, but he lives on in the photographs of this edition. Jean is the doyen of Canberra orchid people and she worked with Tony for many years to educate us all about orchids and the need to conserve them. Tobias, who came on board after Tony’s death, has already established himself as a first-rate scientist, field naturalist and orchid photographer. His PhD thesis was on the tangled relationships between greenhood orchids and their wasp pollinators. Roger is a retired entomologist and a long-standing stalwart of ANPSC who has contributed (doubtless with Tobias) invaluable detailed material on pollination in the introduction to each genus in the book and an excellent and superbly illustrated general essay on orchid pollination in the overall introduction.
These genus introductions are one of many strengths in the book. In addition to Roger’s important pollination notes, there are paragraphs on name etymology, the status of the taxonomy (a big one in botany these days, and the orchid scene has been especially volatile — of which more later), ecology and morphology. And it is the approach to the latter that especially appeals to me. It is understandably traditional to use ink sketches to elucidate the sometimes somewhat abstruse terminology that is specific to orchids (beyond the more familiar botanical terms). However, the authors have utilised the considerable photographic expertise available to them — in addition to the fine works of Tony, Tobias and Roger they have the contributions of nearly 30 very good and mostly local orchid photographers to call upon. Each genus introduction features a carefully selected photograph with the salient features indicated. If you’re new to orchids, or even to particular genera in some cases, terms like galea, lateral sepal, labellum, column, callus, auricle, boss, side lobe or sinus (and there are many more) can be pretty challenging but these photographs make the concepts admirably clear.
The area covered is east to the Great Dividing Range (Bungonia, Braidwood, Nimmitabel), south to the Victorian border, west to Khancoban and Cootamundra and north to beyond Young and Crookwell. (For the record it is defined by the Canberra Nature Map boundaries.)
This book is all that that I want from a modern field guide. In addition to Roger’s contribution, the introduction contains clear and invaluable chapters on orchid biology and ecology, habitats and importantly, conservation. (Those of us who value native flora and fauna enough to go searching for them for our pleasure, must also take an active interest in their conservation.) Inside the front cover is a useful spread of thumbnails that provide a ‘cheat’s guide’/short cut to each genus. There is a busy page per species, with typically three or four relevant photos and brief entries on flowering, size, status and habitat, plus Notes, which particularly refers to similar species, a very useful inclusion. There is also a welcome map, whose area is larger than that of the specified area of the book’s coverage and includes records of the species outside of this range, including down to the coast, which is potentially useful too. For possessors of the first edition, who may be wondering whether to upgrade, this inclusion of the map per species fixes what I considered to be a rare shortcoming in that edition. It does mean a reduction in text, but I think it’s a fair exchange. Photos have been thoroughly updated and 25 new species included some newly described, others due to the slightly enlarged range coverage.
And these days you can’t really review a book on Australian orchids without mentioning taxonomy. Even within the broader landscape of the resetting of botanical taxonomy to a presumption of lumping monophyletic groupings into as large a family, genus etc as possible, orchid systematics has been messy and even sometimes unpleasant for a couple of decades now. For a while the detailed pioneering biochemical work of David Jones and Mark Clements was at least partly accepted and we had far more nuanced understandings of big and important genera such as Caladenia and Pterostylis. This was achieved by breaking them into smaller genera, which usually were also intuitively distinct but still related, and placed together in sub-families. Obvious examples are the spider orchids in Caladenia and rustyhoods in Pterostylis. However the Australian taxonomical powers-that-be came down pretty heavily on this heresy, and officially we’re now back to the original large, lumpy and evidently diverse (though technically valid) genera. This field guide has done something very Australian with regard to this, and had an old-fashioned five bob each way. (It’s worth noting that Egan and Wood stuck their necks out in championing the ‘new taxonomy’ in their 2008 ACT field guide, co-authored with Jones.) They have gone back to big-picture Caladenia, which for good measure has also incorporated the traditionally separate blue fingers and waxlips but retained the seven smaller local genera that used to be packed uncomfortably into Pterostylis. With regard to Pterostylis the authors carefully explain that they “believe that there is significant benefit in recognising obvious morphological differences at generic level”. Quite so. They do not however explain why they do not believe this logic applies to Caladenia. But enough of such human conceits (essential though they are), the orchids are the important characters here.
If you don’t have the first edition of this truly excellent guide and are interested enough to have read this review, you probably need it. If you do have the old edition you probably don’t strictly need this, but you might always wonder what you’re missing out on. And it has maps.
https://www.tobiashayashi.com/book
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